Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Kaz travels to the continent alone. He’s almost certain the lead is correct this time: that’s exactly why van Eck can’t come. Inej doesn’t even know Jesper’s gone yet, because she hasn’t docked in Ketterdam in five months—a hunt for a major slaving fleet and Kaz can’t blame her for taking the chance to excise that particular thorn in her side, except that with every passing day, he resents her more for her absence—and van Eck’s sent letters to Colm, Nina, even Kuwei. Kaz has been too consumed with chasing down hints to make van Eck keep him abreast of whether their replies have arrived yet—none of them have been to Ketterdam in years except for Colm staying in the Van Eck mansion occasionally, so their intelligence would be worthless to him, anyway. Whatever else they may write: he’ll have time to care about their feelings later.

After it’s over. After Jesper is back.

Everyone who knows Jesper is gone is in hysterics, and frankly, Kaz has work to do.

This time, it seems like Kaz’ iron focus has borne fruit. Every trail of a Ketterdam mercher’s trophy husband gone missing turned colder than wet death after the first month—there was one ransom letter, but its authors never even made contact—but that’s not all Jesper is. It’s never been everything Jesper is. No sign the abduction was related to gang warfare—Wylan, drunk out of his mind in month two, screamed at Kaz that it was all his fault but Jesper hasn’t even worked as his enforcer in five years, and anyway, as Kaz hissed back, if Wylan had come to him the second he found Jesper’s side of the bed cold then perhaps Kaz would have had a chance at finding him—and nothing to suggest gambling’s the culprit, either, not ancient debts nor Jesper having fallen off the wagon. Nothing even—and Kaz was an orphan scrabbling at the bottom of an empty bowl to even consider it, but no-one he interrogated had any news of Novyi Zem that in any way made a kidnapping likely. There’s no-one in Ketterdam’s high society that Jesper’s recently insulted, rejected or otherwise annoyed. There’s nothing. The criminal King of Ketterdam makes sure that nothing happens in his realm that he doesn’t know. Jesper’s disappearance should have come with warning signs and rumours, hints, anything. Kaz should have known.

That’s not why losing sight of Jesper hit Kaz this bad. It’s, in fact, a fairly insignificant factor. And yet—in the end the sheer lack of clues may be their salvation. There is a factor that none of the Dregs spiders and lackeys could investigate, but Kaz could. Kaz did.

Jesper’s been missing for four months and two days now. As have many other Grisha from Ketterdam, though at first the exodus just looked like Ravka had offered some new fancy treats. Not Jesper, though, Jesper wouldn’t have gone—Jesper doesn’t even want Grisha life beyond the tricks he plays with his bullets—and that’s when Kaz started casting his net wide for anyone hunting or selling Grisha, until he found out about Lemur and her offer of compliant witches.

Maik and Park stay with the stagecoach, outside the compound. Neither of them have been Dregs for long, but once Kaz heard of Lemur, he knew there was little time to waste. He ordered the nearest goons to buy him a coach. They won’t be much help for anything—neither of them have even met Jesper—but they are capable of caring for horses, and that is what he brought them for. Soon enough, he’ll have his retired right hand back at his side, if his hunch is right.

If he’s lucky, after four months and two days, Jesper will finally return to Ketterdam, where he belongs. If he isn’t—if Jesper isn’t there, Kaz will find a way to steal every scrap of paper and loosen every tongue in the compound for another clue.

Kaz knows he looks rumpled, for the Ketterdam businessman he’s pretending to be. He’s been on the road for three days, though, which will be enough for him to paper over the bare truth that he’s had certain other priorities in the last few months, and no time to pack clothes. He’s even slept in the coach. More than he has in months, even though the constant rattle is agony for his leg.

Kaz limps into Lemur’s palisade-fortified stronghold in the middle of the Ravkan wilderness alone, as he’s been told is custom by the mercher he bribed for his information and killed for his silence. His Grisha girl was skeletal. Nigh-dead, though the mercher insisted he fed her thrice a grown man’s portions five times a day—whether that is a lie, Kaz will know when she either perishes or fattens in the Slat—and if that’s what awaits Jesper… it’s not too soon to plan for that eventuality, but Kaz refuses to think too carefully about plan O nonetheless. Wylan van Eck would be a nightmare if it happens. Inej will be inconsolable. Even Anika, even half the Dregs will cry. But the Grisha girl was first dosed by Lemur seven months ago, she rasped, and that’s still enough time to reverse-engineer the drug into a cure and even if it isn’t, there are ways to stabilize a body on the brink of death, and Kaz has time to explore them, ample time, because Jesper’s only been gone for four months and two days.

+

Lemur insists on seeing to his needs personally. She’s a genial old woman, which will not save her. Neither will her generous offer of a discount if he’ll advertise her services among his partners in Ketterdam, or the speed with which she agrees to assemble her fabrikators once she hears of his urgent business venture. She does not usually let her clients choose the witch, she explains to Kaz with a look of deep concern, she’s running a ‘work experience and rehabilitation’ camp and not a brothel, but—she counts the stack of coin quickly—this once, she’ll make an exception.

They’re lined up in the courtyard when Kaz and Lemur arrive. Exercise, apparently. Keeping mind and body sharp. Neat rows, deeply suspicious in anything but soldiers—and even soldiers are humans drilled like dogs until they perform their tricks—neat rows of neatly dressed Grisha with neat, short, well-combed hair, hand-me-down Ravkan Second Army uniforms, stock-still, and in the third column, second row, there’s…

He inspects a few other Grisha first. None of them flinch when he looks at their faces—he’s pretending to look for health, not figure, just in case Lemur’s protest against prostitution wasn’t just a cruel joke—and then he slowly approaches the dark-skinned man in a pressed uniform that looks like Jesper from a nightmare where he’s lost every single unique cell inside his brain and become a mercher’s assistant, or worse, a stadwatch officer. A Ravkan soldier. Anything but the gangster he’s supposed to be, retired and loved. The boy who followed Kaz on the riskiest ventures: the man lounging in the Van Eck mansion offering his visiting old friend a glass of Zemeni rum and an open ear.

Kaz subtly crooks his fingers in the follow my lead gesture they used as teenagers, before Kaz pared the signs down to the genuinely useful ones he taught to all the Dregs. Jesper’s eyes are blank and his pupils wide, but he blinks twice. Understood, Dirtyhands. It’s him.

Jesper’s alive.

+

Jesper’s not well. Kaz did not expect him to be fine, after four months and two days of kidnap and abject helplessness—losing the luxuries he’s been showered with by van Eck every day must be painful—but once Jesper’s in an office with Kaz and Lemur, it’s as if Kaz has ceased to exist. Jesper’s eyes track Lemur’s hands as if they were the only real kruge in a sea of false gold, and he’s totally ignored Kaz before—his wedding, case in point—but Jesper used to have a clear awareness of the space around him borne of many deathly fights and now, if there was a straggling Liddy approaching, Kaz isn’t sure that Jesper would even have noticed them. There is nothing in Jesper’s brain but Lemur’s hands and the—

Jurda Parem. Lemur doesn’t name the drug, but everything she describes, the amplification of Grisha power, the desperate addiction, the lethality, it points to Parem. An improved version, apparently, or perhaps it’s just the use protocol. Jurda Parem kills its users quickly. Unless they’re Nina Zenik, and Jesper isn’t, but if Lemur is being truthful, he’s been fed minuscule doses of Parem for three months and twenty days now. The small dose retards the point of death: it allows the Grisha body metabolism to break down Parem before a toxic level of side products accumulates, Lemur claims proudly, and Kaz might need to study a few textbooks for the particulars but he understands the gist. This dose won’t kill Jesper. It’s a specifically devised optimum, high enough to ‘heal’ but so low it’s less deadly. It won’t allow him to perform the feats a Grisha on Parem might normally do, but it won’t kill him, and—

“Make sure you keep these out of his reach, son, or he’ll just kill himself. What a waste,” Lemur says. “You’re lucky. It’s just time for a top-up. I’ll demonstrate it, just for you.”

It’s not time. It would be an unlikely coincidence, when Lemur’s stressed that the doses must be administered every five hours on the dot and even tried to sell Kaz a modified pocket watch—which he did not intend to buy, but it was only ten kruge, and may yet contain a hint that’s useful—but Lemur produces a tin box the size of a fingernail.

“Precisely weighed,” she says. “Calibrated to this Grisha. Only five thousand kruge for a hundred tins—”

Jesper’s freedom costs a thousand but this is where the real profit lies, Kaz knows. It’s a common trick. A cheap machine and expensive fuel. Lemur’s not selling Grisha: she’s selling compliance. Obedience. She’s going to die.

“How do you know he’ll consume the whole dose?”

“Just watch, dear,” Lemur says, still twinkling her kindly old eyes at Kaz, and then she unscrews a tin. She sets it on the floor, and then she steps back, smiling, and Kaz—

He needn’t have limped a step back. Jesper’s still got enough control of his faculties to stay away from Lemur—that’s what he’s doing, Kaz realizes, the half-circle he walks is so that he takes the shortest path while being out of her reach—and then he bends and picks up the tiny tin, slowly, with far more dignity than any drugged Grisha that Kaz has seen—because it’s probably not the longest possible time he can go before cruel withdrawal sets in. Lemur’s a saleswoman: a liar, a crook, she knows less about the poison she’s working with than Kuwei Yul-Bo would or than even van Eck may deduce, in all likelihood, at least insofar as the consequences of Parem are concerned that matter right now. Kaz couldn’t give a fuck about Grisha power. About obedience.

Jesper’s not a threat to him: and he only thing that matters right now is his survival.

Van Eck’s would go mad with grief if Jesper died. Having a secret ally on the Merchers’ Council is useful to Kaz, and besides, Inej, Nina… even Anika, who’s currently in charge of the Ketterdam operation, they’re all enamoured with him. Even the substantial contingent of the Dregs who were there for Jesper’s glory days have been dropping by Kaz’ office far more often than usual because they’re worried, they’ve done overtime searching for clues on their own, and Kaz would have tossed every single one of them out of the window for disturbing his own work but not even he could have covered as much mental ground on his own.

The fact remains: Kaz has the city working the way he wants it. Jesper’s death would shake up far more of Ketterdam than Kaz is comfortable with.

Jesper, who dips his tongue hungrily into the small tin and swirls it around, swirls it—and yes, Kaz can see how his question as to how to monitor the dosage might have been naïve, Jesper tongue-fucks the sad little drug tin desperately. He loses some of the control he’s displayed, standing stock-still in a courtyard and bending over gracefully, but only while he’s in the process of taking the Parem: he gives it a few licks when it’s empty, and then he neatly places the tin and the lid into Lemur’s outstretched palm and steps back again.

If Jesper hadn’t reacted to Kaz’ signal back in the courtyard, it would be hard to believe he’s actually the person Kaz knows. Kaz’ skin crawls, but meeting Jesper’s eyes and prompting another secret response would be wretched sentimentality, could wreck the whole endeavour by tipping Lemur off to the fact that Jesper’s worth more than a thousand measly kruge, to half the Ketterdamn underworld and quite a few people who’ve escaped its grasp.

Kaz brought a million kruge with him. He brought no crew to take Lemur down right now, and he might succeed in passing the two guns he’s hiding under his coat to Jesper, he’s faced groups of Dime Lions with only Jesper at his side before, but—Kaz’ leg is throbbing so hard from two days of coach travel that he can barely move, and if Jesper dies now, Wylan van Eck is actually going to kill Kaz. He has the mind, the edge, and Kaz knows the chasm that howls for revenge, he’s built his life on it, and if Kaz gets Jesper killed here, then that chasm will teach Wylan how to kill him.

“I’ll take 200 doses,” Kaz just says. Every five hour: that’s forty-one days. Enough time to wean Jesper off the drug slowly, for Kuwei Yul-Bo to come to Ketterdam and make himself useful, for Wylan to analyse Lemur’s Parem and the stashes that Kaz put in lead cases and sunk in a specific, well-remembered portion of Fifth Harbour to keep it hidden. “And him.”

“It’s a pleasure, dear,” Lemur answers, and Jesper retreats to a far corner unbidden while she hands over a leather case full of—Kaz counts them—two-hundred tins of the substance that every cell in Jesper’s brain must hunger for right now. She writes a fraudulent indenture contract and passes it over. She’s going to wish the entrails around her neck were tight enough to end her life.

Jesper follows Kaz to the coach without a word.

+

“Take off your shirt,” Kaz says. It’s been an hour now since they left the compound. Kaz sat very close to the window, anticipating Jesper’s sprawl, and Jesper—didn’t. Didn’t take up the entire space, like the asshole he’s supposed to be. He’s been quieter than Kaz expected—entirely silent, statuesque, except that his eyes are darting around the coach periodically and then he chews on his fingernails, and sometimes he chews on his actual fingers, too, Kaz suspects, though Jesper always turns to the wall first, raises the other elbow over his face, tries to shield himself from view. When he’s not biting himself or frozen, he tugs on his collar. His cuffs. The thing he’s been dressed in that looks like a discarded Ravkan uniform is still fully buttoned up. Kaz would have expected Jesper’s third action after the rescue—after a joke, after taking up space, after weepily thanking Kaz, whatever—to be turning that uniform into something a little closer to a garment Jesper Llewellyn Fahey would voluntarily wear. The flashy Barrel rat. The trophy husband. Any Jesper. And he clearly wants to. He keeps tugging at the collar. And yet—

“Take off the shirt, Jes.”

“Are you—” Jesper says.

“Jesper.”

Kaz packed nothing whatsoever. He had an inexplicable sense that Lemur would be the one actually useful lead in the search for Jesper, and so he didn’t even go back to the house he’s barely been inside for the past four months and two days, nearly three now—he didn’t go back to change and certainly not to pick up supplies. He ordered the first two Dregs he saw to accompany him in finding a carriage. He must smell—

He shrugs off his coat and then gets to work undoing his cufflinks. “My shirt is rank, but you can have it.”

For the first time since the courtyard, Jesper stares back at him. His eyes are still grey. Still full of life. Still terrified. “You’re—”

Jesper cuts off. He looks at his knees. Whatever he wants to say, he’s not saying it yet, but he catches Kaz’ dress shirt with both hands, so tense they look as if they’re cramping, and then he holds it, for several more minutes, eyes darting wildly despite his lowered head as if he’s expecting someone to come take it away before he hastily shucks off the military shirt and climbs inside Kaz’ discarded laundry.

Kaz lets him have the coat, too. If it gets colder, he’ll pick Jesper’s prison uniform off the coach floor, but for now—for now, Jesper looks almost relaxed kneading the heavy wool of his coat in his fists and the world is so much closer to right than it’s been in these past long four months and two days.

Chapter Text

Jesper doesn’t talk. He doesn’t joke, even when Kaz sets up the dirtiest jabs imaginable at his own expense, shots that he knows—he knows—Jesper would never miss. But Jesper does.

Nothing helps, not even… Kaz knows Jesper enjoys mock-flirting, and so when nothing else worked and he needed something, anything to distract from the pulsating ache in his leg, he resorted to innuendo, to dick jokes, to talking about that time he got threatened, mocked and chased out for card-counting by Big Lynn the bouncer and sprouted an awkward teenage erection because she was just so tall and rugged and angry and—nothing.

It would have been less strange if Jesper had shot him down with an, “I’m married,” a “Talk to Inej first,” even though that’s never happened before. It's Jesper who’d start flirting, usually, his words idle and secure because he knows that Kaz knows that Jesper loves Wylan to death and it was just fun for him, trading compliments, making Kaz—Jesper claimed, though it was a dirty lie—making him blush, making him sling back barbed insults that Jesper just laughed at because after all these years Jesper knew that if Kaz ever meant any of his vitriol, he’d be dead.

Jesper doesn’t talk.

The last conversation they had was four months and fifteen days ago. Ten days before Jesper went missing. Kaz doesn’t like how annoyed he still is, that it was for months fifteen days ago and not four months and five.

Worse: he only found out two whole days after the abduction.

It could have been weeks. He didn’t talk to Jesper for ten days before he was taken, and he probably wouldn’t have thought to show up in the Van Eck house to grant Jesper the pleasure of annoying him for several more days. If Wylan van Eck hadn’t come to Kaz’ office crying, maybe he’d never have—no, Kaz would have found out, he would have known what happened to Jesper. He would have been able to search for him, eventually, even though they don’t live in each others’ pockets anymore like they did when they were just Dirtyhands and his favourite new recruit. Jesper is still a person of significance in Ketterdam, even though he’s now just a mercher’s trophy husband. He’s still the kind of person the crime King of Ketterdam would keep an eye on. It doesn’t matter that their paths rarely cross now, unless either of them deliberately seeks an evening of drink and talk. It—

Lemur’s pocket watch chimes. Kaz checks his own: eight bells. Five hours after the last dose. Lemur’s watch is still accurate, then, and so he bangs on the coach roof to signal for Park to halt the coach, and to wake Maik. It’s Maik’s turn to sleep up there, holding the Parem bag close to his chest as if his life depends on it—because it does. If Maik loses the bag, he’ll wish he’d died. It’s an intolerable risk, to give the drug Jesper’s life depends on out of Kaz’ hands. Keeping it in here, with Jesper, for the three-day journey back when Kaz’ leg is beyond sore and the knowledge that Jesper’s alive and in his sight again threatens to drop off his adrenaline to a level where he might just doze off again—keeping the Parem in Jesper’s line of sight would be worse, when Jesper’s pupils track the path every tin takes and light up at the sight of the bag. There were no good options. Thus far, Maik and Park have not disappointed.

“Thank fuck,” comes Park’s high voice as he opens the coach door and passes a Parem tin to Kaz. “I need a shit, boss. Five minutes.”

“No more.”

Hopefully Park appreciates it. They all piss out of the moving coach. They’ve stopped once to change horses when the old ones started to lag—Maik picked up some food there too, but Jesper barely ate—and they’ve halted fourteen times for the Parem, but never longer than it takes to pass over the tin. It’s a routine by now. Jesper turns away before he swallows the drug, and he doesn’t meet Kaz’ eyes for a long time after he takes it. One time, he scrabbled so desperately for the Parem that he touched Kaz’ glove—and flinched, harder than Kaz did. He’s ashamed. He has no reason to be ashamed. He’ll survive what Lemur did to him: he’ll be back home with his adoring husband soon, and Lemur will die.

It's not the only reason why Kaz ordered the horses driven to the brink of their endurance. Of course, he wants to bring Jesper home. He wants to see van Eck’s face when he opens the door—wants to hear Wylan van Eck apologise for ever insinuating that Kaz just didn’t care and that’s why the search was taking so long. He wants to see Jesper soothe the shaking of his hands by burying them Wylan’s hair, wants to see the two men kiss, wants to see which of them will drag the other into their bedroom without even saying goodbye to Kaz.

He wants the world right again.

Selfishly, he also wants to be back in the house, alone. He wants to massage his leg and recall his butler the day after, so she’ll prepare him hot water he can use to rub the grime and the cramps out of his thigh. He won’t even make it up to the first floor bedroom in this state, at least not on the day he arrives in Ketterdam, he knows. Luckily, Inej told him to convert one of the ground floor offices in the house into another bedroom: she knows Kaz too well, even though she couldn’t have predicted he’d spend six days without break tortured by the rattle of a racing stagecoach on dirt roads. She knew he’d do something desperate, reckless, careless of his body’s limits.

Kaz misses Ketterdam. He misses the stones under his feet. He misses the Dregs: misses Anika who has a spine and stands up to him, unlike these two new boys.

It’s cruel, but after three days of Jesper subtly rocking in tune with the stagecoach—three days of Jesper’s silence, of this shell, this non-Jesper, he’s ready to be alone.

He’s done his part.

Kaz murders the Crows’ enemies. He inflicts vengeance. He schemes and searches, but that’s what he’s good at, what he sold the rotting tatters of his soul for that day when he crawled out of the Harbour. Kaz brings death: he doesn’t bring healing, and there’s nothing more he can do for Jesper.

It’s Wylan’s turn now.

+

Kaz only has to pass Jesper one more dose before the coach reaches Ketterdam. He’s given thought now as to how to handle the problem of Jesper’s current dependence on the Parem when they’re separated in Ketterdam. Abrupt withdrawal will be agonizing or fatal, that seems likely from Kaz’ past experience with Jurda Parem and he won’t chance Jesper’s life on the possibility it will be fine with Lemur’s small doses—especially not when she’s using the drug to keep captive Grisha compliant. If a cold withdrawal was easy and survivable, it wouldn’t fit her purposes. He’s not going to bet Jesper’s life on anything that’s not absolute stone cold certainty.

Van Eck’s soft. He’s not going to intentionally give Jesper more Jurda Parem than will keep him alive, but Kaz knows that once Jesper recovers from this odd silent mood—once he’s Jesper again—he’ll show the pain he must be feeling, and he’ll beg for his drug. If he doesn’t, he’ll search for it, the moment van Eck’s not paying attention—he was like that with the cards, too, apparently in control of his faculties one day and a thousand kruge deeper in debt the next. Van Eck doesn’t know what Jesper’s like, in the depths of a card game rush, not like Kaz does—Kaz exploited Jesper’s addiction and he locked Jesper up to keep him from playing, whichever served his purposes more—so van Eck’s going to be caught off guard with how desperate, how mean, how terrified Jesper can get when he's denied his fix.

Kaz isn’t going to gamble Jesper’s life on the chance that Wylan will know how to keep Jesper in check.

He’ll give Wylan—two tins of the Parem, one of which he’ll be instructed should only be touched in emergencies when van Eck can’t get to Kaz in time for resupply.

That way, van Eck will be forced to keep Kaz in the loop as to how Jesper’s doing, too.

It’s a good plan A.

Like every plan A, it falls to pieces once the stagecoach comes to a stop in front of the Van Eck mansion.

“Please,” Jesper mumbles. He’s meeting Kaz’ eyes again, after a quick glance out of the window—meeting them when he hasn’t, for most of the journey, and he looks awful. He looks terrified. He didn’t jump out of the coach, the way he was supposed to, skipping happily up to the door: he shrinks back into himself instead. Back into Kaz’ wool coat that he’s wrapped around his trembling shoulders. He’s far closer to the Jesper that Kaz remembers, but Jesper right in the beginning, when he'd just lost his last rent money and more. When he knew that he’d failed—failed to win five games in a row, failed out of university, failed his father.

Kaz holds his breath.

“Please. I can’t be Jesper for him. Not yet.”

He hasn’t spoken a whole sentence in days. He’s not asked for anything, has shared no clue as to what he’s witnessed or what would help him.

Kaz’ leg aches, and so do his tired eyelids.

Kaz is a killer, not a healer.

He bangs his cane against the coach roof until Maik looks in, and then he tells him the address of the house. It’s not far from van Eck’s mansion, and yet…

+

The last time Kaz saw Jordie alive, he was laying on his side, an arm thrown over Kaz—it was night-time, it was cold, and they were trying to sleep—moaning and whining and sobbing from the fever-pain. He didn’t shut up for hours, and it was already—Kaz was too sick himself to count bells, but it was so late, by the time he was mute enough to let Kaz sleep.

Jesper is quiet. He sleeps, curled up, on the only bed on the house’s ground floor, the one in the refurbished office that Kaz was ordered by Inej to make use of in emergencies. Jesper’s a tall man, made even taller by the way he sprawls, talks, laughs, but the past four months have robbed him of more than just hours and weeks. He sits like he’s afraid now. He sleeps like he’s afraid, in one of Kaz’ nightshirts, knees clutched tightly to his chest, face hidden under the lapels of the dirty coat Kaz gave him.

Kaz has vengeances to plot. News to catch up to. Letters to write. A leg to uncramp.

He does not move from his chair until it’s time for the next dose.

Chapter Text

Jesper doesn’t sleep through the night. Kaz doesn’t either, despite the mounting ache behind his eyes, and so he's always already awake to see the startled jerk and then the relief when Jesper notices him. He shakes awake every few minutes, and Kaz watches the way his arms grow slack once he realizes where he is and then hug his knees again. The way his cheek burrows into the old pillow that’s not been washed in far too long. The way the worry lines leech from his eyes as his lids slide shut. It's—humbling, that trust.

He was never good at getting an early, deep rest. Jesper’s a very late sleeper. If Kaz had let him get away with it, Jesper’d have become a fully crepuscular creature—and it would have suited the work they did, too. Crime dances the night away and sleeps through breakfast and lunch. Kaz used to be immature enough, though, that most mornings, he’d still wake Jesper at seven bells sharp. Jesper learned to stop complaining. It was his own fault, anyway: he was the least boring company Kaz had when he was young, always hungry for the next fight, the next prize, the next opportunity to make eye contact and mutter a lascivious joke.

He was—Kaz quickly came to doubt that back then he was as happy as he looked, once he saw Jesper change in Wylan’s arms, but he was obnoxious, fierce, alive.

Kaz would pay most of the money he’s secreted away all over Ketterdam or invested in a variety of business, for Jesper to annoy him like that again. He should be rubbing Kaz’ face in the fact that a little after the nine bells dose of Parem, Jesper’s movements grow more and more sluggish and then he stops turning over altogether as he drops into a deep, exhausted sleep. He should be crowing that see, I just sleep better when the sun’s about to rise. It’s a fact of the universe. Some people sleep at eight bells in the evening, some people don’t sleep at all, and this beautiful face is at peak performance only when you let me sleep through breakfast. Admit I’m right, boss. I’m always right. You’re just a sore loser, stop hitting—

They only got into a slap fight once. Every other altercation was either serious or one-sided disciplinary measures, but that time, Jesper was in the process of moving his ludicrously many hideous shirts over to the Van Eck mansion and Kaz tagged along to—supervise. Jesper said something scathing about Slat supper and how he wouldn’t miss it that Kaz refused to grant was actually true, and so he lightly rapped Jesper on the head. Jesper picked up a curtain rod in return and hit him back, fencing off Kaz’ careful prods and landing jabs with the alacrity of a man who wasn’t using a murder weapon in a play fight, and when Kaz had wrestled the curtain rod off him he—started chucking the contents of his jewellery boxes at Kaz, one by one, while dodging blows, with nothing but his secret Grisha power. He got two nipple rings tangled up in Kaz’ hair, so badly that it must have been on purpose, and he guffawed—

But Kaz has dawdled enough. It’s already halfway to eleven bells, and Jesper’s exhaustion shan’t keep him asleep—safe to leave alone—for long.

Kaz has work to do. No matter how heavy his leg is and how much his eyelids push him down to the floor, he must make preparations, contact Anika, van Eck, Kuwei, his butler… Unearth his drowned Parem supply. Hire a Healer. Plot Lemur’s demise. Find a solution for Jesper’s addiction.

He’s not Jesper, whose only job now is to stay alive.

+

Kaz hasn’t quite decided how to handle the Dregs just yet. His approach will have to depend on any other progress he’s able to make, today. For the past—roughly two months, everyday business has been fully delegated to Anika, and even before that, he let slip more and more of his duties in order to pursue the barest hints of Jesper’s trail.

Now that Jesper’s home, Kaz should return to work post-haste. Every day he leaves Anika at the helm of the Dregs improves her position for a leadership challenge. She will grasp for the crown one day: Kaz would not have made her interim boss, nor even his deputy, if she didn't have ambition and gumption in spades. Still. He needn’t make it that easy, for her to take over.

He shouldn’t even be wrestling with this problem. He should have handed Jesper off to van Eck—to his husband—and then refused to show up for the thank-you dinner that Jesper would have been sure to throw him.

There’s still time to pick up that plan. The travel pains must have diminished Kaz’ mental capacity enough that he agreed to let Jesper spend the night—and weakened Jesper so much, that he… wanted to freshen up before the marathon reunion sex he’s going to have with Wylan, or whatever else drove him to that stupid request of staying with Kaz when Wylan’s right there, desperate to wait on him hand and foot until he’s recovered. Now, though, they’ve both had time to reorient themselves. Time to remember their priorities.

Kaz jots down a quick note for his butler to carry over to the Van Eck mansion. Amne: read this aloud. Van Eck, your prince is back. Come collect him. Bring clothes, and then the address of the house. Kaz is loath to tell van Eck where he lives, but this is the easiest way to hand Jesper over. He’ll just have to move house later. Inej will forgive him. She told him to create a home: not that it had to be permanent.

Amne will handle all other communications, as well. She’s the person he must contact first: everything else, the butler will handle for him, while he tells Jesper to wake up and get ready to go home.

Kaz’ butler went to stay with a friend while he was busy, a ten minutes’ walk from Kaz’ house—forty minutes, with the state of his leg—and unfortunately, it turns out, Amne’s friend lives on the fifth floor. By the time he’s up there, Kaz is holding himself up by sheer force of will and the fact his torso’s half-laying on the banister. To recuperate, he writes up coded letters with orders to Anika at the rickety kitchen table while Amne and her friend tactfully ignore him to talk about Jesper.

He’s the one who recommended Amne to Kaz, back when Kaz—and Inej, for a short time—first moved into the house and needed someone trustworthy to run the household. Kaz… appreciates his Dregs, but they’re not trustworthy. Amne, though. Kaz met her several times, back when he was sixteen. She was one of the few people Jesper actually dated—for about five months, besotted enough to bring her to the Slat despite Kaz’ objections at having a law-abiding bakery worker in their den of thieves. She was good-humoured then, impossible to faze, and secretive. Jesper’s breakups are either amicable or utterly disastrous, and she was the former, apparently: they kept in touch and years later, she upended her entire life and dipped her feet into Ketterdam’s underworld for nothing but a good pay check and Jesper’s—disingenuous—assurances about Kaz’ character.

Amne takes the notes to Anika and van Eck, plus letters to Kuwei and Nina, and she follows him into the street without mentioning his pained whimpers.

By the time Kaz makes it back to the house, it’s already ten past fourteen bells. He’s late for Jesper’s dose.

+

Kaz unlocks the door to the downstairs bedroom, where Jesper’s hopefully still asleep. Well—he attempts to. He pushes his key into the lock, and it won’t go all the way in, not by wriggling and not by brute strength. His lockpicks won’t open the door either, no matter what tricks Kaz tries, and—he removes them to switch to a different set—a tip’s broken off from desperation he didn’t even quite notice, he—

“Jesper! Jes, are you—”

“Hey, Kaz.”

So Jesper’s still inside. And alive. The fifteen minute delay in eating his Parem didn’t kill him, didn’t render him comatose, but maybe it—

“The lock won’t open. I’ll—”

“I locked the door, Kaz.” Jesper’s voice is soothing, much quieter than Kaz—he must have been shouting—but it makes little sense. Jesper doesn’t have a—Fabrikator, he’s a sodding Fabrikator, but still, why would he lock an already locked door? And why won’t he undo it now?

“Open the door.”

“No.”

“Jes, what—”

“I melted the lock. It’s the only way. I need to stop taking—”

“Don’t be a fucking idiot—”

“Remember that night just a week before my wedding? You locked me up in your office because I was so wired and you told me—” You’re not gambling ever again, Jesper. You’re not pissing this chance away, be grateful I’m locking you in with me because I promise, if you fuck this up I’m not taking you back, the Dregs aren’t taking you back. Just stop fucking gambling, Kaz had hissed back then. He remembers it well. The rest of the night is less clear—eventually Kaz had tired of Jesper ranting about deserving more trust from his oldest friend and so on, and offered him some of the rum he kept around to dull the edges of his pain… “—you told me that locking me up is the only way until I grow up and get enough willpower to make it through a month without disappointing everyone I know. And you were fucking right—”

“Unmelt my lock, you asshole, right now,” Kaz hisses, banging his cane against the door but it’s no use: this is his house, and every single door has been reinforced so it can’t just be kicked in. Fuck.

“—I can’t be trusted, you were right, I can’t, but I guess we’ll know now—”

“Did you plan this?!

“It’s necessary, don’t you see, I—”

“You don’t even have water in there, Jesper! How the fuck are you going to survive Jurda Parem withdrawal without water—”

“—and I can’t, I knew as soon as I swallowed that it was over, I’m not Nina, I can’t stop, I—but I can at least try to do the right thing and k—”

“There’s no piss bucket in there, either! I swear, if you piss in my bedroom you’re dead meat, Jes—”

“I’m scared. I’m so scared, Kaz. Tell Wy I love him.”

“Open the fucking door now.”

But it’s no use. Jesper’s far too much of a stubborn idiot to listen to Kaz, now that he’s no longer a Dreg, and even before he acted much too friendly with Kaz to really fear the consequences of disobedience—or rather, Kaz was too familiar, he let Jesper get away with far too much, stopped trying to earn his fear somewhere during the very first year, for entirely selfish reasons, and now this is the price: Jesper, dying of Parem withdrawal, alone, in a room he locked himself.

“I have a plan to get you off Parem,” Kaz shouts at the silent door.

He presses his ear against the wood: for moans of pain, apologies, breath, anything.

Jesper’s quiet. It’s as if he’s gone—as if he just scampered out of the…

Window.

Kaz drags his dead weight leg outside into the small barren backyard. Through the ex-office window, he can see Jesper, wrapped tightly in Kaz’ coat and huddled against the immobile door. Kaz limps up to the glass pane—fuck Jesper, if Kaz hadn’t brought him back to the house then his leg wouldn’t hurt worse than a punishment beating now—but if Kaz hasn’t brought him here then it would be Wylan, dealing with Jesper’s inexplicable masochistic streak—Wylan, having to make sure Jesper doesn’t fucking die and Kaz loves Wylan but the only person he can even begin to trust with carrying out the task of keeping Jesper from being stupid enough to die is himself—

Kaz shoots quick glances at the neighbouring houses. No-ne at the windows.

He smashes his cane through the glass.

Jesper’s head rises, but not as quickly as Kaz would want: his movements are clammed up, and his eyes are rimmed red and bloodshot. It’s thirty minutes after he should have received his dose, Kaz’ pocket-watch says.

Kaz knocks out the bigger shards at the bottom of the window frame, and then he pulls himself inside. It’s agony, even before he tumbles head-first onto the carpet, and finally—

When he looks up, the first thing he sees is Jesper’s naked sweaty knees. He’s not touching Kaz, but only because he’s waiting for permission. A curt nod, and he grabs Kaz under the armpits and hauls him over to sit on the bed, next to Jesper, an unbridgeable hand’s width apart.

They sit. In the silence, while he tries to think of something to say that isn’t just you fucking stupid idiot three thousand times, Kaz fancies he can hear his pocket-watches ticking, counting as they speed further and further away from the schedule that’ll keep Jesper alive long enough for Kaz to figure out a safe, functional plan for weaning him off the drug, ideally drawing on Kuwei’s expertise and Nina’s first-hand experience but with Jesper’s—erratic behaviour, they probably don’t have the time to wait for either of their answering letters let alone their arrival in Ketterdam.

If they have any time at all.

If this stunt isn’t the end.

Three emergency tins of Parem burn against Kaz’ skin, hidden inside his underpants. He could force the drug down Jesper’s gullet: and Jesper will even forgive him eventually, because he’s Jesper. Still, it’s easier to proceed with Jesper’s full cooperation for the time being, so unless the withdrawal grows life-threatening…

He’s counting on Jesper’s aversion to pain to make him ask for the Parem. His weak willpower. His usual behaviour pattern with addiction. It’s not a kind thought about what even Kaz has to admit used to be his best friend before he quit the Dregs, but he will take realism over kindness if it saves Jesper’s life.

Jesper’s shivering. To stop imagining the way his organs may be breaking down this very second—a strong reckless heart growing mould and a unique loved brain flickering quicker and quicker until it explodes and drips out of Jesper’s eyeholes—his drugged decay hidden from Kaz’ view by the coat and miles of familiar skin drenched with cold acrid sweat, he musters his gloves. The holes ripped into them by the window shards. The already dried blood.

No stadwatch have knocked on the door, yet, so none of his neighbours must have noticed the break-in. Kaz should reinforce the ground floor windows, or install iron grates: it won’t do, how easily he could break into this house. Anyone could get in here.

Jesper’s still shivering. Whimpering. He’s not looking at Kaz when he mumbles, “The last time I felt like this, I offered to blow the guard.”

“Jes?” Fuck, Kaz wants to say, and did that human piece of filth ra—tell me his name, his face, let me kill him for you. I can’t save you from it but he will die screaming. Instead, he hovers his gloved glass-studded hand over Jesper’s.

Jesper grasps hold like it will keep him from dropping off the pier. He crushes it: Kaz can feel glass grinding into his flesh, but it doesn’t matter.

“It was a test, a—they wanted me to understand what they could take away. That I was—she was there the whole time, or he would have—I should have seen her, I shouldn’t have said because it just proved to her Grisha are—I don’t know, I don’t even know what I thought would happen except that I would do anything for the next dose, I…”

“You’re safe now,” Kaz rasps, and swallows twice. He shouldn’t be here. This is Wylan’s job. But if Kaz is what’s available now… He leans back before he pulls their clasped hands towards his lap.

A silent invitation.

Jesper takes it. He collapses onto Kaz’ knees and howls his next words, muffled, into the trousers. “I tried to cheat on my fucking husband!” The fabric grows soggy with tears, and Kaz clenches his unoccupied fist so the bright pain will keep him out of the harbour. “I tried to cheat on Wylan, I—for another fucking fix—I know you think I’m a slut but I’ve never treated anyone badly. I’ve never cheated. I’ve never—I love Wylan, I love him so much, and I fucking—I cheated—I’m so fucking sorry—I—I just—I’m so fucking scared—”

“You’re safe, it’s over, he loves you,” Kaz answers him, over and over, and he’s never felt so inadequate and impotent in his life.