Work Text:
He couldn’t help the way Wylan’s words kept echoing in his mind.
Despite winter nearing its end, the Ketterdam streets were still a little darker than they usually were in the summer. A featherlight veil of snow covered everything in the evenings, the delicate white hiding the roughness of the cobblestone underneath. He found himself staring down off one window of the Van Eck Manor, its owner’s words repeating over and over in his head. In some weird way, they had found a steady, but eerie rhythm. Kaz thought this might be what Wylan’s stream of consciousness sounded like. Then, he recoiled and told himself to stop imagining what was going on inside of Wylan’s mind. If he kept trying to puzzle out the man, he might as well start losing his mind.
“He might try to kill me,” the young mercher had said. “It wouldn’t be the first time. He might as well try to drown me again.”
The casualness of it all was what stung the most, Kaz thought.
It had started with an unsurprising invite for dinner. With Jan Van Eck’s trial getting closer and closer, they’d been too consumed with getting themselves ready for whatever was about to come. He’d been having weekly meetings with both Wylan and Jesper, discussing strategies and testimonies. Every time, he saw the way deep, sharping anxiety took over the youngest boy. Every time, eventually, inevitably, he watched as Wylan curled in on himself, making himself smaller and smaller, as if just by willing it enough he could disappear. Every time, Kaz pretended not to care. Now, his whole facade had been torn up to pieces.
It was supposed to be just another uneventful night. Kaz returned the day before to a letter resting on his desk, the (now) familiar Van Eck seal illuminated by the low light from the window. He didn’t want to acknowledge it, but, despite his best wishes, he often found himself waiting for a letter from the Geldstraat. He hated himself for it, for allowing himself just another distraction —just another weakness— but, in the end, he just couldn’t help it. The two idiots had carved their way into his routine, and, before he knew it, they were wrapped around him. It was too late to do anything about it. He was, after all, a man of habit.
It had been Jesper’s idea. In the few, quick words of the letter —mixed with too many jokes considering the circumstances, may he add— he invited him over for dinner the next day. Wylan had been working himself up for the last month and a half. It was a logical move to invite someone over to ease up some of the tension, a break in the routine to distract him from his worries. Besides Jesper, Kaz just happened to be the only other person who truly knew how badly the mercher was coping. He also hated how much he noticed his pain.
In his frenzy state, he couldn't accurately recall how they started talking about the trial. He assumed the idea for the night was to avoid anything related to it, but it had come up anyway. It might have been Wylan himself who brought it up —one too many glasses of wine in— unable to escape his anxious and stressed conscience. Before Kaz knew it, Wylan was talking about drowning in the same waters he had almost drowned in as a child.
Yes, the most unsettling part was how casually he had talked about it.
“He tried to kill me once— before, you know, that time in the Ferolind. He hired two hitmen to kill me back when I was still living with him.” Kaz could hear the roughness in his voice behind the pretended easiness. Wylan nursed the glass of wine for a few seconds, a faraway look settling on his face as the next words slipped from his tongue, “I don’t know how it happened, but I ended up jumping from a ship. I swam all the way back to Ketterdam— to the Barrel, actually. That’s how I ended up there in the first place.”
Before Jesper could reply, before Wylan could add anything to his drunken confession, Kaz had stormed out of the living room. He chided himself for the dramatics, but, at the moment, he couldn’t stop himself. He ran as fast as his somewhat unresponsive body allowed him. Wylan’s words kept ringing in his mind, a cacophony of broken glass. He could feel the waters rising. With bile in his mouth and a dizzy head, he wandered from room to room until he stumbled upon one down the corridor, locking the door behind him.
He wasn’t quite sure how much time he might have been there. He remembered, suddenly, that he’d left his cane next to his chair in the dining room. He hated how weak he looked right now, alone and away, hiding in a mercher’s house— and not because he was on a job. He could feel shame wash over him once again, a feeling he was becoming well-acquainted with these days. He hated how scared he felt, too, how hard he was grasping the windowsill, how ragged his breathing had become. He felt like he was drowning once again, the coldness and the darkness swallowing him whole. His vision blurred. He swore he could taste the salt water on his tongue.
Suddenly, the door opened and someone stepped into the room.
“I would apologize for lockpicking, but this is my house,” Wylan’s voice echoed in the emptiness of the room. “Besides, you were the one who taught me. You can’t train a falcon, then expect it not to hunt.”
He closed the door behind him, the light of the hallway fading with it. Kaz noted how the mercher didn’t move any closer. He hated himself for it but couldn’t help the gratefulness that grew in his chest. Right now, he needed as much space as possible.
The both of them settled into the quiet of the room, the silence only broken by his stupid, agitated breathing. Yet he could feel it getting to safer grounds, his senses coming back to himself. Again, he both hated and appreciated that Wylan allowed him time to recover.
“You should’ve learned by now not to disturb an armed man,” Kaz rasped when he could regain control over his voice. “You never know how he may react.”
Despite the dark, he could see Wylan shrugging, “After living with Jesper for the past five months, I discovered I enjoy a taste of riskiness too.”
The both of them fell into a comfortable silence for a while. Then, the youngest boy spoke up.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you and Ghezen knows I don’t expect you to tell me, but I brought up some wine,” he can see, now, the two glasses in his hand, glistening under the frail light coming from the window. “Another thing I’ve learned from living with Jesper: everything seems less bad with enough wine in your system.”
Just like that, Wylan settled on the table in the center of the room, uncorking the bottle of wine. Kaz inhaled deeply, trying to steady his breathing, and approached the table. He accepted the glass the mercher was offering, downing it all in one gulp. He thanked the way the wine stung his throat, giving him something else to focus on.
“I wouldn’t have taken you as someone who drinks away his problems.”
Wylan sipped his wine, then settled his glass graciously. “I usually I’m not, but telling my friend how my father tried to kill me and him hurrying away instantly kind of screams for alcohol.”
Kaz winced a bit at that. Even he could see how it must have looked up for Wylan. He let a deafening silence linger, trying to grasp himself, trying not to lose control once again. “I didn’t leave the room because your pathetic excuse of a father tried to kill you,” he offered. He could act like he couldn’t stand Wylan and Jesper all he wanted, but, deep down, he knew the truth. He had come to rely on them just like he relied on Inej. They had come to be the only two people that he could count on in her absence. He wasn’t going to sacrifice that just because of some idiotic weakness.
“Then why did you?”
He hated that about Wylan. He had a way of speaking so matter-of-factly that was alien to Kaz. He spoke as if there was nothing to lose, as if things simply just… were. He spoke like there was nothing to risk, and, even if there was, he was brave enough to face it. He told the truth like it was easy. He supposed, for Wylan, maybe it was. The boy had a rare way with words, unusual in the roughness of the streets of the Barrel and, he’d learned, in the Geldstraat too. He talked easily, plainly, with no second intentions, no attempts to sugarcoat it. Kaz had started to both admire and despise that trait. He appreciated it when he saw things others couldn’t, when his calm voice sounded despite the chaos around him. Right now, though, he was leaning toward hatred.
“What makes you think I owe you an explanation?”
“You don’t,” said Wylan, ever so straightforward, “but I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
Kaz saw what Wylan was doing. His skin crawled because of his gentleness. He wanted to throw himself out the window, to burn down the whole room, to hit him until he saw who Kaz really was: the bastard of the Barrel, Dirtyhands, the leader of the Dregs. But he knew it was futile: no violence could give him control over the situation. Wylan could see right through all of that. Kaz had committed the imprudence to let him in, and he was at his mercy now.
He wasn’t planning to answer him. He was waiting for the second Wylan got distracted to slide away from the room, to walk away and leave all this nonsense in the past. Yet, something took over him, something akin to what made him tell Inej about Jordie the first time. The words escaped his mouth before he could understand them, stop them: “I almost drowned in the sea, too.”
He witnessed the exact moment the words hit Wylan, the calmness he had exuded since entering the room breaking. Confusion and sadness mixed on his face, and Kaz could tell he was speechless. Wylan stared at him, his mouth agape, trying to process what he had just said. He pondered, dimly, if his face had looked that way when Wylan had spoken his truth, too.
He couldn’t help but feel the sharp sting of anxiety wobbling on his chest, his pulse quickening. He felt ragged, exposed after talking about something not even Inej knew. He never confided in Wylan this way; he never intended to. A fear took over him, the fear of being known, of being seen for the first time in a long while. Only Inej had seen him like this before— the times he had tried to open up to her. He had never meant to let someone else see him like this. It was meant to be only Inej, just Inej. Yet, there it was, unraveling in front of him. The words had stumbled out of his lips, almost as if Kaz owed them to Wylan. Despite his fear, he knew Wylan wouldn’t tell anyone, wouldn’t repeat the words spoken in the quiet of this room— just like Inej would never tell his secrets. Either way, he couldn’t help the way the certainty of his silence made his skin crawl.
Through his panic, Kaz heard the other boy’s response, “I didn’t know.” Kaz looked up at him then and saw the heavy weight of Wylan’s eyes on himself. “You never said… I... I never thought you—”
Kaz could almost hear the thoughts racing through Wylan’s mind, and it was an unnerving thing to witness. He understood what he was thinking. He recognized the pained expression on his face. Kaz had seen it himself every time he looked at a mirror, after all. Later, he would despise himself for it, but he couldn’t help the rage that seized him. Once more, the words slipped from his lips before he could think twice about it, “Stop thinking you’re anything like me. I came out of the harbor renewed, with anger on one hand and revenge on the other. I’m not some broken mess of a man because of it.”
He regretted it the moment he’d said it, a sour taste in his mouth as he watched Wylan flinching. His face flickered with a hurt Kaz wasn’t prepared for, but just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. The boy had come to learn to hide his feelings, too, it seemed. Wylan looked up at him and didn’t recoil when Kaz tapped the table as he would have done before. With flames in his eyes, mixed with a familiar hint of sadness, Wylan spoke, “I’m not broken because of what I lived,” something like disappointment laced with his words as he told him, “I didn’t take you as one to define others by their past. You’re the one who told me not to let shame define who I am.”
And, well, Kaz couldn’t fight him when Wylan was living by his own stupid, pretentious words. Although hearing them from Wylan’s lips made them sound true. Kaz had told him what he needed to hear himself, without actually knowing that their pasts shared more than any of them was willing to confide just yet.
But now, here, in the dim light of the room, he could acknowledge that Wylan made a point. He wasn’t broken, and neither was he a mess. If any of them were a mess, it was without a doubt Kaz. And if he couldn’t quite believe this man, all steady and grown up, speaking up to him and leaving him speechless was the same boy that had once sat down, with eyes closed and covering his head, while they were under attack in the Fifth Harbor, he wasn’t going to tell Wylan.
“Look, I get how you feel,” Kaz gave him a puzzled look. “Fine, I know nothing about you, and you’re just as mysterious and misunderstood as you want to believe you are,” Wylan stated, rolling his eyes. “Still, I’m the only person that knows what it’s like to almost drown. I’m the only one that won’t pity you. I lived it too, after all.”
Just like that, Wylan unlocked the last brick of the barrier he had built up to keep his feelings at bay. He felt like he could hear the unsaid promise hanging in the air between them: I won’t think less of you for it. I will be there if you let me . He hated that he knew Wylan enough to know what his words meant but didn’t say, that Wylan knew him enough to know that, if he had spoken them, Kaz would have recoiled back to his shell. In the end, he realized it didn’t bug him that much anymore.
Instead, Kaz felt a surge of appreciation —fuck it, he was past denying the merchling meant something to him—. He was starting to give a different meaning to the connection he had always felt for Wylan. He thought about all the times he had chosen Wylan over someone more qualified for a job, every time he silenced the Dregs’ complaints about his inexperienced new demo man. How many times had Kaz given him another chance to prove himself? How many times had Wylan not only proven himself but exceeded any and all of his expectations?
“Maybe we have more in common than we thought,” Kaz amended after a silence had settled between them. It was the best he could do for an apology.
A knock interrupted the conversation, and a head poked from the door. “Comin’ to check you didn’t murder my boyfriend, Brekker,” Jesper joked as he walked into the room. It didn’t escape Kaz’s eyes the way Wylan’s cheeks turned bright red.
“We were just drinking some wine, actually,” Wylan said, handing Jesper his glass. “Wanna join us?”
The once suffocating atmosphere gave way to the usual banter between the three of them. Like most nights in the Van Eck Manor, they found themselves getting drunk, with Wylan playing the piano while Jesper sang —or screamed, in Kaz’s opinion— invented lyrics to accompany the melodies. Despite the conversation putting him on edge, Kaz began to feel less frightened, more comfortable. Here was Wylan, leaving his past behind, refusing to let shame define who he was, and he was trying his best to create a life for himself. If the merchling could move on, then perhaps Kaz could too, one day.
The waters had receded. Finally, it felt as though Kaz was standing on the coast, gazing out at the horizon, the sun shining on his skin. For once, it didn’t feel like he was drowning.