#febuwhump said 'whump kaz brekker' and i said 'okayyy 😇'

[jackwolfes]

@febuwhump day 8/alt: bleeding out/emergency surgery Nina & Kaz & Jesper | Six of Crows | TW: blood, wounds, vomitting febuwhump masterlist

Nina Zenik has blood on her hands. 

It is thick, sticky with the stench of iron and a young man’s pulse (although it's heavier than his pulse, which is light as a feather and faint. Too faint.) 

There's a lifeless look on Jesper's face that Nina doesn't like. He'd been laughing through the pain until she knocked him out — that had been easy. She is good, almost too good, at stealing the breath from men’s lungs. 

Less talented is she at saving their stupid lives, but she's on her knees in a dusty old safehouse with Jesper's blood soaking into the knee of her trousers anyway. 

A figure throws itself through the door and barricades it shut in short order. 

Something clatters. Nina looks up and meets Kaz’s eye. He has lurched backwards against the door. There is a deathly pallor on his already ghastly face, and a dangerous look slides across it. It feels like looking at a tiger with meat in its mouth: men like Kaz should never be scared. 

Nina is too aware that Jesper's blood is up her wrists and smudged on her face, that he's lying like some bony fucking corpse beneath her, but the rapid fire bullet strike of Kaz's racing pulse rattles inside Nina’s head. It is a perfect storm that distracts her from the dirty work of knitting Jesper's lungs back together at exactly the wrong moment. 

“Fuck!” 

Nina loses her tentative grip on the stringy sinew inside Jesper's body, feels it slip. Blood gushes free inside his body and surges out of all the wrong places. 

“Oh, Saints, come on—”

Kaz’s voice is a knife; brittle and unwelcome. “What have you done?” 

“I’m not a healer,” Nina replies snappishly. “I need you to help me.”

She digs her hands hard into the bloody wreck of Jesper’s abdomen. The thready knots of muscle beneath his clammy skin are complicated tapestries, and although Nina is an artful master there are limits — infuriating, agonising limits — to what she can achieve. 

“Put your hands here and press down or else he'll bleed out before I can stitch him up,” she insists. “Help me or he dies.” 

The tiger is ravenous, and the boy is too afraid for his own good. 

“No.” 

Impatience erupts in Nina's chest. “I can feel him dying, Kaz! Get over yourself for two seconds, please!”

There is anger and bitter hatred in Kaz’s black eyes when he takes stock of their situation and sees the outcomes for what they are. No locks to pick, no clever ways to outwit fate: just Jesper, very near to dying. 

Kaz Brekker has too much blood on his hands and in a moment, he will have even more.

He drops to his knees with an ungentle thunk, possibly past feeling his own pain. Nina feels it for him, carved into her bones as if taunting her with what guilt will feel like when she doesn't manage to keep this boy alive. 

A con-man’s bait and switch, their hands swap places like a bar of soap and a rich man’s wallet. Blood dribbles between the gaps in Kaz's fingers, pulse slower than it should be but still too much. 

Nina swears, dirty Ravkan then Kerch and a little bit of Fjerdan just for good measure. She bends her fingers and tenses up so hard they start to cramp, pulling blindly at organ tissue and musculature until she starts to feel more than the desperate beat of her own heart intertwined with the poorly hidden panic of Kaz’s. 

Skin is an easier thing to stitch. Nina knits the gaping gash on Jesper's stomach closed with shaking fingers as sweat drips down over her eyebrows. 

With the last of her energy, she collapses backwards. Her palm smears a bloody handprint on the floor behind her. 

Kaz barely turns around before he vomits. It's graceless, disgusting, but Nina does him the courtesy of not pointing that out. 

There is little more than hatred in Kaz's eyes when he looks up at her, but it's hard for that to feel genuine when his sweaty hair is plastered to his face and the shining tears in his eyes are still visible. He rubs the back of hand against his mouth, smearing blood on his chin. 

Kaz isn't a tiger, not really. He's a rascally cub. Scared, deadly, vulnerable, but not monstrous. Not good, either. Just terribly committed to staying alive. 

“Jesper is going to be so mad when he wakes up and finds out you barfed on his trousers,” Nina says. 

“Then he's an ungrateful bastard,” Kaz replies. 

Neither of them laugh, but they do both smile.