please consider...... angsty fic where Jesper is in a gunfight and actually gets shot for once. it might only be in the side but just the sudden panic he'd get of realising he's not invincible and Y/N did a whole freaking out and leaving before this could happen. Y/N being scared for good reason..... waking up with Y/N at his bedside????????
For One Last Good Night With You - Jesper Fahey
Content Warnings: Angst. Canon Compliant Violence, Threat And Injury. Explicit Language. Not Beta/Proof Read.
It was such a ridiculous fight. Jesper couldn't have been more convinced that there was nothing less worthy of arguing over than this. But argued about it you did. You had damn near lost your mind trying to make him understand and he just couldn't fathom it.
Did you doubt him? Because every ounce of concern you had, every fear you expressed, it sounded like you thought he couldn't handle himself. It sounded like a dismissal of his capabilities. He couldn't hear it. He couldn't even indulge it. Jesper Fahey, for all his gambling debt, and all the reasons to doubt the facts, might not consider himself lucky, but invincible? That he was sure of.
Jesper spent his days feeling like nothing could touch him, because nothing had. Every job with Kaz, he might have barely made it out of so many of them, but he made it out. He has been out gunned more times than he can count and he left without a thread of his jacket torn, while others did not have that courtesy of that.
Although your concern for him was moving at first, the way you were so clearly worried about him coming home, from what you considered an unnecessarily dangerous job, the amusement he had at it slipped away when he saw just how serious you were. You were worried. Worried so deep and so true that you tried your best to dissuade him from this job, and that should have told Jesper something. But what it told him was you doubted his ability to handle himself. It showed a lack of faith in him. That was so far from the truth, but Jesper wasn't able to see that. Not while you're telling him over and over that you cannot handle the idea of him not coming home. All he could wonder is when had he ever given you cause to doubt him? When had he ever not come back to you? Why did you doubt him?
You had wanted him to see the insanity in the plan, in the odds, not doubt himself. You had tried every type of reasoning you could think of to help Jesper see that you believed in him, but you were scared, and you had all the reasons in the world to be. Something felt wrong here, something felt off and miscalculated and you couldn't explain it, but you were scared for him, scared for him in a way you haven't been before. You wouldn't call yourself superstitious, but you felt it in your bones like a bad omen and you didn't know how to make him see. And the more you tried, the less he heard, the more he seemed determine to prove himself, determined to throw himself into the line of fire. So you walked out.
You walked out into The Barrel without another word because each word seemed to just make more problems than the last and you could not push him even further into this. You had to get out of that argument and that room before you completely broke down. You couldn't change his mind and all your trying seemed to make it worse, so you had to leave. You had to get far away from those words and that feeling, and you had to just hope, hope and saints maybe even pray that Jesper could be lucky this time. Even if luck was not something you believed in, that anyone in The Barrel really believed in. You just hoped that maybe it was enough.
He had been too distracted, and he had been too cocky and the mixture of both on his shoulders are a too dangerous mix for this evening, for this plan, for the eight men he counted as seven.
The bullet landed in the higher side of his left shoulder, and the pain is not remotely close to the shock that hits Jesper with the same force of the bullet. He actually let himself get hit, he hasn't gone that before. He has never felt the way the bullet tears through muscle upon entry and again on exit. The shot is clean and barely hits him low enough to do more than graze, but the blood dripping down on his ruffled shirt is very real and the pain is not something he can ignore.
"Jesper?" Comes Inej's voice from the dark, but his vision is swimming and blurred to the point where he cannot tell if Inej is being her shadow like self or if he is losing consciousness.
He cannot remember a time in his life when his breathing has been this shallow, this laboured, this difficult. He knows it's panic, at least a part of him knows it, but the bigger part of him right now is screaming inside his head. This cannot be how he dies. Not here. Not like this. Not leaving things the way he had with you.
"Jesper!" Inej's voice is louder now, and her hand grips his arm with such a suddenness that if Jesper was in his body he would've reacted so fiercely to. But Jesper is miles away, the pain throbbing, the panic squeezing his chest tighter with every breath, his mind with you.
Jesper thinks maybe Inej is trying to say more words but her voice is losing out against the heaviness of his breath and the sound in his head.
Not like this. Not now. Not like this.
"Please," the word falls from his lips as if every other part of his pleading had been said out loud. If Inej responds, if anyone does, Jesper doesn't hear them before he blacks out.
"Out of the woods? Out of the fucking woods? Brekker if I wasn't preoccupied I would ring your neck," you shout, across the slat. Nina is working her hardest on Jesper's shoulder but the pain lurches him awake. He goes to speak but Nina catches him and fixes him with a look.
"Not a word, luckshot," she tells him. "Not a damn word."
"You're assuming you could get that close to me," Kaz responds. Jesper hadn't been conscious for the Kaz the others had seen a few hours before, the Kaz who saw Jesper, no colour in his eyes, laid out and bleeding on the new rug. The Kaz who's voice wavered, who's attachments became all too clear as he nearly let his cane fall from his viper grip.
"Brekker if he died, nothing could have stopped me from ending you," you warned.
"It wasn't his fault," Inej tried, her knees pulled into her chest, head resting on them, arms wrapped tightly around them, holding herself still and together. She trusted Nina, but nearly seeing Jesper bleed out in an alleyway in The Barrel had taken it out of her. She saw Jesper as a brother, and she had already lost one of those. Kaz felt very much the same but tried to bury it under anger. Anger that fizzled out before it reached yours, it flickered in comparison to your rage.
"I told him, I told all of you," your words sound sore now, like your throat is giving way to them. Jesper knows that sound, even if he wishes he didn't. You'd been crying, and not a gentle cautious, keep yourself contained type of cry, no you had screamed your lungs raw.
He hadn't wanted to say goodbye, and you hadn't want to lose him, both the same. "Inej, Kaz, step outside please," Nina says. "I'm trying to work here and you're not helping."
Inej looks to Nina as if to ask what she had done to be sent away, but Nina just eyed back Kaz and Inej understood: she was being sent to keep Kaz calm, to not risk Kaz trying to get revenge before he'd thought everything through.
Jesper feels himself slipping again, the pain making him giveaway and he tries to speak your name before he succumbs to it, but nothing leaves his mouth, and it's just darkness again.
When Jesper wakes again, he can feel the bandage on his shoulder, he can feel how everything is back where it should be, blood staying inside his body, but it still hurts worse than any hangover. He tries to sit up but only then notices the weight on his chest. You're resting on him, you must've fallen asleep waiting for him to wake. You're exhausted, Jesper has no way to tell how long he had been out, and how long he had made you worry. A thousand different apologies climbed into his mind but not a single one would do, not a single one was good enough.
"Jes?" You mumble as you wake from the steady breathing in Jesper's chest changing to a faster pace.
"I'm awake," he tells you. You look at him and he can see that anger, the anger he had seen before he left for the job, the anger he heard you have when spitting venom at Kaz before, and it melts away.
"You scared me you asshole," you tell him, bundling the fabric of his shirt in your hands.
He places a hand delicately on the side of your face and then without the grace or cocky demeanor you're used to, he pulls you into a kiss. A kiss that tells you that he knows how close he came, how much he scared you, a kiss that tells you he is sorry and he never wants to put you through that again. "I'm sorry Ace," he whispers. A smile breaks on your lips, Ace, his lucky card, you'd always had mixed feelings on that nickname, as you did on anything he related back to gambling, but you'd never been so glad to hear it fall from his lips.
"I love you Jesper Fahey," you tell him plain. He looks back at you, and it's not that he ever doubted it, it's not that you'd never said it. It's just... Hearing it now, felt like the first time, felt like the beginning of something and the culmination of it the same.
"I love you," he says, pulling you in for another kiss, "and I'm sorry-"
"Don't be sorry, just be save... Be alive... Be here."
"Okay," he agrees. "Okay."
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