#only Kaz would think that handing out a box of chocolates is too forward

[angelparadox]

@fawnworked liked for a valentines starter

"hey," he said as he approaches Oliver with a box of chocolates. "i got these for you. i thought you might, i'dunno... like them or something." they're clearly embarrassed as he's holding the box out, cheeks a nice rosy color. he's never done anything like this before, doesn't know what came over them, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. they hope it's not too forward.

[bastard-of-the-barrel]

Hey, odd request but could you post the scene about where Kaz faints in the prison truck? I lost my copy of the book and I really wanted to read that scene today

The hinges held.

Another shout in Fjerdan, more footsteps. Then the crack of the reins and the cart surged forward, rumbling over the road. Inej let herself exhale. Her throat had gone completely dry.

Kaz took his place beside her. He shoved a hood over her head, and the musty smell filled her nostrils. He would put his own hood on next, then lock himself in. Easy enough, a cheap magician’s trick, and Kaz knew them all. His arm pressed along hers from shoulder to elbow as he locked the collar around his neck. Bodies shifted against Inej’s back and side, crowding up against her.

For now they were safe. But despite the rattle of the wagon’s wheels, Inej could tell Kaz’s breathing had got worse – shallow, rapid pants like an animal caught in a trap. It was a sound she’d never thought to hear from him.

It was because she was listening so closely that she knew the exact moment when Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, the bastard of the Barrel and the deadliest boy in Ketterdam, fainted.

---

The money Mister Hertzoon had left with Kaz and Jordie ran out the following week. Jordie tried to return his new coat, but the shop wouldn’t take it, and Kaz’s boots had clearly been worn.

When they brought the loan agreement Mister Hertzoon had signed to the bank, they found that – for all its official-looking seals – it was worthless paper. No one knew of Mister Hertzoon or his business partner.

They were evicted from the boarding house two days later, and had to find a bridge to sleep under, but were soon rousted by the stadwatch. After that, they wandered aimlessly until morning. Jordie insisted that they go back to the coffeehouse. They sat for a long time in the park across the street. When night came, and the watch began its rounds, Kaz and Jordie headed south, into the streets of the lower Barrel, where the police did not bother to patrol.

They slept beneath a set of stairs in an alley behind a tavern, tucked between a discarded stove and bags of kitchen refuse. No one bothered them that night, but the next they were discovered by a gang of boys who told them they were in Razorgull territory. They gave Jordie a thrashing and knocked Kaz into the canal, but not before they took his boots.

Jordie fished Kaz out of the water and gave him his dry coat.

“I’m hungry,” Kaz said.

“I’m not,” Jordie replied. And for some reason that had struck Kaz as funny, and they’d both started laughing. Jordie wrapped his arms around Kaz and said, “The city is winning so far. But you’ll see who wins in the end.”

The next morning, Jordie woke with a fever.

In years to come people would call the outbreak of firepox that struck Ketterdam the Queen’s Lady Plague, after the ship believed to have brought the contagion to the city. It hit the crowded slums of the Barrel hardest. Bodies piled up in the streets, and sickboats moved through the canals, using long shovels and hooks to tumble corpses onto their platforms and haul them out to the Reaper’s Barge for burning.

Kaz’s fever came on two days after Jordie’s. They had no money for medicine or a medik, so they huddled together in a pile of broken-up wooden boxes that they dubbed the Nest.

No one came to roust them. The gangs had all been laid low by disease.

When the fever reached full fire, Kaz dreamed he had returned to the farm, and when he knocked on the door, he saw Dream Jordie and Dream Kaz already there, sitting at the kitchen table. They peered at him through the window, but they wouldn’t let him in, so he wandered through the meadow, afraid to lie down in the tall grass.

When he woke, he couldn’t smell hay or clover or apples, only coalsmoke, and the spongy rotting vegetable stink of garbage. Jordie was lying next to him, staring at the sky. “Don’t leave me,” Kaz wanted to say, but he was too tired. So he laid his head on Jordie’s chest. It felt wrong already, cold and hard.

He thought he was dreaming when the bodymen rolled him onto the sickboat. He felt himself falling, and then he was caught in a tangle of bodies. He tried to scream, but he was too weak. They were everywhere, legs and arms and stiff bellies, rotting limbs and blue-lipped faces covered in firepox sores. He floated in and out of consciousness, unsure of what was real or fever dream as the flatboat moved out to sea. When they tumbled him into the shallows of the Reaper’s Barge, he somehow found the strength to cry out.

“I’m alive,” he shouted, as loud as he could. But he was so small, and the boat was already drifting back to harbour.

Kaz tried to pull Jordie from the water. His body was covered in the little blooming sores that gave the firepox its name, his skin white and bruised. Kaz thought of the little wind-up dog, of drinking hot chocolate on the bridge. He thought that heaven would look like the kitchen of the house on Zelverstraat and smell like hutspot cooking in the Hertzoons’ oven. He still had Saskia’s red ribbon. He could give it back to her. They would make candies out of quince paste. Margit would play the piano, and he could fall asleep by the fire. He closed his eyes and waited to die.

Kaz expected to wake in the next world, warm and safe, his belly full, Jordie beside him. Instead, he woke surrounded by corpses. He was lying in the shallows of the Reaper’s Barge, his clothes soaked through, skin wrinkled from the damp. Jordie’s body was beside him, barely recognisable, white and swollen with rot, floating on the surface like some kind of gruesome deep sea fish.

Kaz’s vision had cleared, and the rash had receded. His fever had broken. He’d forgotten his hunger, but he was thirsty enough that he thought he would go mad.

All that day and night, he waited in the pile of bodies, looking out at the harbour, hoping the flatboat would return. They had to come to set the fires that would burn the corpses, but when? Did the bodymen collect every day? Every other day? He was weak and dehydrated. He knew he wouldn’t last much longer. The coast seemed so far away, and he knew he was too weak to swim the distance. He had survived the fever, but he might well die out here on the Reaper’s Barge. Did he care? There was nothing waiting for him in the city except more hunger and dark alleys and the damp of the canals. Even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true. Vengeance was waiting, vengeance for Jordie and maybe for himself, too. But he would have to go to meet it.

When night came, and the tide changed direction, Kaz forced himself to lay hands on Jordie’s body. He was too frail to swim on his own, but with Jordie’s help, he could float. He held tight to his brother and kicked towards the lights of Ketterdam. Together, they drifted, Jordie’s distended body acting as a raft. Kaz kept kicking, trying not to think of his brother, of the taut, bloated feel of Jordie’s flesh beneath his hands; he tried not to think of anything but the rhythm of his legs moving through the sea. He’d heard there were sharks in these waters, but he knew they wouldn’t touch him. He was a monster now, too.

He kept kicking, and when dawn came, he looked up to find himself at the east end of the Lid. The harbour was nearly deserted; the plague had caused shipping in and out of Kerch to grind to a halt.

The last hundred yards were hard. The tide had turned once more, and it was working against him. But Kaz had hope now, hope and fury, twin flames burning inside him. They guided him to the dock and up the ladder. When he reached the top, he flopped down on his back on the wooden slats, then forced himself to roll over. Jordie’s body was caught in the current, bumping against the pylon below. His eyes were still open, and for a moment, Kaz thought his brother was staring back at him. But Jordie didn’t speak, he didn’t blink, his gaze didn’t shift as the tide dragged him free of the pylon and began to carry him out to sea.

I should close his eyes, thought Kaz. But he knew if he climbed down the ladder and waded back into the sea, he would never find his way out again. He’d simply let himself drown, and that wasn’t possible any more. He had to live. Someone had to pay.

---

In the prison wagon, Kaz woke to a sharp jab against his thigh. He was ice cold and in darkness. There were bodies all around him, pressing against his back, his sides. He was drowning in corpses.

“Kaz.” A whisper.

He shuddered.

Another jab to his thigh.

“Kaz.” Inej’s voice. He managed a deep breath through his nose. He felt her pull away from him. Somehow, in the cramped confines of the wagon, she managed to give him space. His heart was pounding.

“Keep talking,” he rasped.

“What?”

“Just keep talking.”

“We’re passing through the prison gate. We made it past the first two checkpoints.”

That brought him fully to his senses. They’d gone through two checkpoints. That meant they’d been counted. Someone had opened that door – not once but twice – maybe even laid hands on him, and he hadn’t woken. He could have been robbed, killed. He’d imagined his death a thousand ways, but never sleeping through it.

He forced himself to breathe deeply, despite the smell of bodies. He’d kept his gloves on, something the guards might have easily taken note of, and a frustrating concession to his weakness, but if he hadn’t, he felt fairly sure he’d have gone completely mad.

Behind him, he could hear the other prisoners murmuring to one another in different languages. Despite the fears the darkness woke in him, he gave thanks for it. He could only hope that the rest of his crew, hooded and burdened by their own anxiety, hadn’t noticed anything strange about his behaviour. He’d been sluggish, slow to react when they’d ambushed the wagon, but that was all, and he could make up some excuse to account for it.

He hated that Inej had seen him this way, that anyone had, but on the heels of that thought came another: Better it should be her. In his bones, he knew that she would never speak of it to anyone, that she would never use this knowledge against him. She relied on his reputation. She wouldn’t want him to look weak. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Inej would never betray him. He knew it. Kaz felt ill. Though he’d trusted her with his life countless times, it felt much more frightening to trust her with this shame.

The wagon came to a halt. The bolt slid back, and the doors flew open.

[okashi-candyman]

Scarves and Rain | Drabble

//It’s definitely canon that Okashi and Kaz (@kaz-sunspot) run into each other like all the time, but have never actually had a conversation. Like, the Panya bakery is Kaz’s favorite, and occasionally Okashi is behind the register. And they both go to UA for hero studies, but they’re in different classes. But they never talk, and don’t really even know each other’s names. But they still know some things about each other just because they see each other so often, if that makes sense?

Anyway, I wanted to write about the two of them, so here:

🍭  It was a slow day at the bakery. Okashi idled lazily behind the counter, watching heavy rain spatter relentlessly against the storefront windows. He hadn’t really expected many people to come in, they usually didn’t on rainy days like this, but he’d been here for several hours now and hadn’t had a single person walk in.

He sighed, leaning against the counter with his head propped up on his arms. If only someone else could have worked while his folks were away, but Amai and Komu, his twin sisters, were busy, and his other siblings were too young to watch the store on their own. So that just left him, tracing circles around donuts in the display case and waiting for no one to walk through the door.

The bell above the door chimed, and Okashi straightened up immediately, throwing on his customer service smile as he turned to the door. “Welcome to the Panya bakery!” He said automatically, but when he actually got a look at who was in the doorway, he was so confused that he forgot to say what pastries were on sale today.

The girl in the doorway looked over at him and nodded silently. That in itself didn’t surprise him, in all the times she’d come in, this particular customer only ever spoke when she was asking for what she wanted or to say ‘thank you.’ No, the thing that had caught his attention was the thick scarf around her neck that was pulled up to cover half her face, soaked in rainwater. Okashi knew it was a little chilly out because of the rain, but certainly it wasn’t that cold.

He watched her browse the store, trying to be as discreet as possible. Maybe if this was just some random person, he wouldn’t be so curious, but she was a regular. And not just that, he knew her from school too. She wasn’t in his class, but she was a hero course student too, so he saw her pretty regularly. But he’d never seen her wear a scarf like that, even on days colder than this one.

As she browsed, Okashi briefly wondered if maybe he should start up a conversation. This was the first person he’d seen all day. Surely, they could find something to talk about. He got the impression that she was kind of shy, but if he just started talking to...

Okashi paused in his train of thought, eyebrows knitting together thoughtfully as he stared down at the counter. Wait, did he even know this girl’s name? He was trying to come up with it, but was drawing a blank. How could he not know her name? She came here all the time! 

“Ngxxt!”

The noise, though admittedly very quiet, was loud enough in the silent room to startle him. He looked up, but the girl was still looking through their selection of cookies. Okashi raised an eyebrow at her. He didn’t know why she bothered to browse. She always ended up getting cake. He’d never seen her buy anything else.

After what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a couple minutes, the girl finally wandered over to the selection of cakes near the register. Okashi smiled faintly as he watched her out of the corner of his eye. She was looking between the two types of cake they had on display (there would normally be more, but they’d been expecting a slow day), apparently unable to decide.

He saw her hand move and thought perhaps she’d made a decision, but when he glanced over, she seemed to be looking off into the distance, one hand hovering in front of her scarf. And then her head bobbed forward and she pressed her hand against the thick wool over her mouth. “...Ngxxt!!”

Okashi blinked, suddenly realizing what was going on, and then quickly looked away before she could notice him staring. He was suddenly very glad that she was so indecisive about what to get, because it allowed him to sneak little glances at her while she was so close to the counter, noticing things he hadn’t seen before. The paleness of her face. The dark circles under fever-bright eyes. The flush in her cheeks, mostly hidden beneath the scarf, but peeking out just enough to see.

He frowned, his fingers fiddling with a small box nestled in his pocket. So she was sick, and relatively seriously by the looks of it. But then what was she doing here? Surely, if someone knew, they wouldn’t have let her go walking out there in the rain...

Which of course meant that no one knew. She must have been trying to keep it hidden. That was probably what the scarf was for.

“Um...” Okashi looked over at the quiet voice, even quieter than normal. She was looking at him, one hand pointing towards the chocolate cake on display. “Could I get one piece of the—” She turned away slightly, coughing harshly into her scarf. “S-sorry. The...”

“The chocolate?” Okashi offered, wincing at the hoarseness to her voice. She nodded gratefully. “Sure thing! Coming right up.” He turned, deftly packaging her order into a glossy, white box with a blue and pink label printed on the top. She had the money, in exact change, sitting on the counter by the time he was done. “Here you go,” he slide the money to his side of the counter and pushed the little box towards her.

She picked it up. “Thank you.” As she was turning to go, Okashi put a hand up towards her and pulled the little box out of his pocket.

“Hold on! Here.” He pulled a stick of matcha pocky out of the box and held it out to her. The girl tipped her head at him, her expression dazed and confused. “Sorry, I know this is weird, but it’ll help. I promise.” He couldn’t just let her walk back out into the rain in her condition, not if there was something he could do to help.

She raised an eyebrow at him like she didn’t know what he was talking about, but she did reach out her free hand and let him place the pocky stick in it before turning to leave again.

“W-wait!” Okashi said, reaching over the counter to stop her again. “If you walk outside with that, it’ll get soaked and it won’t taste good. You should just eat it here.” She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously, then glanced down at the pocky stick. “It’s not going to hurt you, I promise,” he added, quickly pulling another stick from the box and sticking it in his mouth to prove it. 

Okashi wasn’t sure he was being very convincing. It was probably only the fact that she knew he was a hero course student that led her to pull down her scarf and stick the candy he’d given her into her mouth. By the time she’d finished eating it, Okashi could already see some improvement. She’d gained a little color back into her face and the glassy shine in her eyes had cleared. She wasn’t back to 100%, not even close, which only confirmed Okashi’s suspicions that she’d been seriously ill.

“What’s all this about?” she asked, blinking in surprise and bringing a hand up to touch the scarf. Her voice sounded significantly less like it had been raked with a cheese grater now. “What did you do?”

Okashi smiled innocently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He glanced down at the mostly empty box of pocky in his hand and held it out to her. “Here, why don’t you take the rest of this? I think you need it more than I do.” She stared at him for a long moment, so long that Okashi gave up on her taking the box from him and just placed it on top of her cake box instead. “Seriously, just trust me on this.”

She hesitated, as if she might try to give it back, but then nodded once. “Sure...okay,” she answered slowly, picking up the pocky box and slipping it into her pocket, “...thanks?”

Okashi just smiled and watched her head towards the door. She reached out to push it open, but then paused for a moment to pull her scarf back up over her face. Usually, when the customers leave, whoever’s working the counter is supposed to tell them to ‘Come again soon!’ or ‘Have a nice day!’ but with a small wave and the best cheery voice he could muster, Okashi called out, “Get well soon!”

She spun to face him, her eyes wide with alarm and maybe panic. “How did—?” Her question was quickly cut short as a sneeze caught her off guard, almost making her drop her cake box. “Ktxshhuh!!”

“Gesundheit.” Okashi propped his head up with his elbows, giving her a concerned little smile. “You know we can do deliveries, right? You shouldn’t walk all the way here if you’re sick.” He pointed to the package in her hands. “The number’s on the box. I hope you use it next time.”

Her face had gone beet red, which Okashi assumed was from embarrassment, not fever, and her gaze was glued to the floor. “I...I will. Thank you,” she muttered, nodding once and slipping out the door.

And then the bakery was quiet again. Okashi sighed, stepping out from behind the counter to check if anything needed to be done. He knew the answer was no, since no one else had been in and the display cases had been filled that morning, but it was nice to stretch his legs and walk around for a minute.

He stopped by the window and look out, watching the rain start to lighten up, droplets pattering much more gently against the window. “I hope she’s okay,” he muttered to himself, “I’ll have to check up on her at school tomorrow. Maybe I can ask one of her classmates how she’s doing.”

Okashi stopped, his shoulders dropping suddenly.

“Shoot! I forgot to ask what her name was!”