BETWEEN APERTURE & WOUND.

SEVERIN VAN AALST. 28. CAPTAIN OF THE STADWATCH. DREG.

❝   saints, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? of self-worship and self-loathing? of glory and disgust?   ❞

I.  HISTORY / TRAITS / DYNAMICS.   II.  SKELETON.   III.  PINTEREST.

Ketterdam isn’t a city made for fire. It’s a place half-drowned by its own canals and the ever-present damp seeping into each crevice and alleyway. For all that it seems to be held together by rotten timber and driftwood, the Slat goes up in flames like a street performer’s sleight-of-hand trick. The flick of a match, the flip of a lighter. Smoke billows from the rooftops, eating away at the beams and foundations like a starving thing. Something living and breathing and ravenous for more to burn.

Sev’s accustomed to chaos and pandemonium — you couldn’t survive a day in the Stadwatch without expecting the worst and preparing for anything that could go wrong to go disastrously astray. But he’s never seen so much disaster erupt all at once, a cacophony of shouts and gunfire, people fleeing from buildings on either side and pouring into the streets to avoid being eaten alive by fire. It says something warped about him, probably, something twisted already beyond salvation or tenuous grasp at redemption, that his first thought is the Dregs. The alarm that slams through him at the thought of them swallowed up in flame and ash, trapped in the crumbling ruins of their former refuge, chokes him as swiftly as the smoke climbing his lungs.

Saints, when did he start caring more about the lives of some gutter rats and thieves than his own? Than the lives of the people he’d supposedly been sworn to protect? 

He surges into a doorway two houses down from the Slat to shield a woman and her crying babe from the heat of the fire, yanking his coat from his shoulders to keep the simmering air at bay. In a fire, especially one stoked by Grisha magic, every element becomes an enemy. The sky itself has gone grey and soot-streaked, suffocating the air itself from any gasp at safety. He’s about to surge back into the clouds of ash rising from the street when a blade slashes out at him, close enough to draw blood. Sev whirls on his heel, coat whipping in an arc around him, the thick wool distracting the assailant’s through-line to him as he pulls out his own knife. A drüskelle, just his Saints-damned luck, armed to kill. 

They lock knives and then arms, fists flying into a fray of bloodied survival. Sev ducks a swing thundering fast into his face and kicks out at the man’s feet. He doesn’t see the other one coming until he’s knocked flat on his back, wheezing for breath like a last prayer. His eyes flutter, struggling to see through the haze of smoke, barely sketching out the shape of the hulking drüskelle moving towards him like a predator stalking wounded prey. And then a bullet, two, three, exploding forth from the air and blooming out of the man’s chest like blood-soaked carnations. There’s only one man in Ketterdam who shoots like that. Sev lets out a stunned gasp, staggering to his feet as he spins, squinting through the fumes. 

SEVERIN / @sanktsev

❝  ──  come windless invader, haunted beat of blood. a hush descends over EAST STAVE before the arrival of henrick von de leyen. ❞

This anger — she recognizes it. Childlike, flailing; without grace or tenacity. The quiver of arrow poised; the breaking of dawn, the breaking of skin — into a wound that’s somewhere between rage and complete surrender. 

An informant lies unconscious on the floor. His papers — Severin’s assignment, to be urgently retrieved — in her pocket. 

She hadn’t actively searched for him. Yet somehow, in the days following her return to Ketterdam, Severin had been everywhere — his memory in decay of the abandoned buildings, the cobblestone streets where she’d scraped her knees one too many times, the salt of the sea’s air that clung to her lashes and stung her vision blurred. Like a ghost trying to break out of its mirrored reflection, Severin had etched himself into her memories of Ketterdam. 

Once, she had been able to silence him. To silence them — the memories. Once bright and soft, now decayed by disappointment; rusted and tarnished with time, shadows clinging upon her like scar tissue. The memories, which had once been the present — which had once been twined in the song of fairytales, of hopes for a future framed by walls that weren’t gray and peeling; of blood that could be held as sacred instead of spilled for survival. ‘Come away with me,’ she had whispered ten years ago, in a room much like this one, small hands clasped around his like the beginning of a prayer to a saint she’d long forgotten the name of.

Back then, she should have known — that even wallpaper with painted flowers was bound to become sullied by time; that blood, like all things, could be washed away by sea. 

Vasilisa didn’t have a name for it — that hollowness. That loss; that grief for hopes fractured by reality (and too, perhaps grief for the children with eyes that seen too much, too young; children had never truly been children). She didn’t have a name for it — that moment when he hadn’t shown up and the ring of blood in her ears sounded too little like heart and too much like ache. 

Movement in the shadows.

“Sev.”

She didn’t have a name for it, so she gave it his. 

Time does strange things to memory. Blurs it, like water seeping into ink and parchment, obscures it through the haze of story and sentimentality. The version of history you tell yourself to make peace with it, the twist in the tale that can still fit on your tongue without the swallowed blood and lingering rust. Too often, too easily, the lies you spin so you can stomach your own sins, so you can bear to wake another day and put that Stadwatch coat on without it feeling like a funeral shroud.

In the midst of chaos and hellfire, the Slat crumbling into ash and ruin around them, he finds her. Or she finds him. — Those lines have always been nebulous with them.

She looks the same, and also nothing at all like the girl his memory had held in its cupped palms like a Saint’s rosary. His memory had painted her small and slight in retrospection, a scrap of a thing distinguishable by her wild, dark eyes and an air of leashed violence. She’d seemed untouchable, then. A ball of barreling viciousness and survival instinct, teeth bared to any that would dare underestimate her. All save when she smiled, and it lit her face like a lantern floating on a wide, fathomless sea. Well. She certainly isn’t smiling at him now. He doesn’t know if there’s a word for the expression on her face — splintered between rage and grief and some misplaced longing — in any language, spoken or dead. 

It’s a moment he's imagined, deconstructed, dissected in his mind at length — a hypothetical game he would play with himself halfway into dream or lapsed trail of thought. What would he say, what would he do, how would he explain himself, if he ever saw her again? How would he convince her, palms outspread and features cool and composed, radiating calm, or would he plead, the tail-end of a sob story on his lips, the bitterness of his father’s betrayal? Would she believe him? Would she care? He’s passed endless days and nights of mind-numbing Stadwatch patrols letting his mind wander into the impenetrable dark of possibility, the no man’s land that lay just beyond reverie and hollowed fantasy. He knew the answer. Of course he did. If he were her, he would have not forgiven himself either. 

None of it had mattered, in the end, because he would never see her again. It was a fate he had consigned them to with the worldliness of a boy become man, a soldier of an order of men that stood for something. There was no place in his mind left for girls with hair black as midnight and a smile like a crescent moon. His memory, however, hoarded every image and moment of her like a dragon guarding infinite treasure. 

He should have known she’d find him anywhere, in a burning building or drowning ship. 

open starter setting: the slat, kitchen, 6AM

She glances up at once when she hears someone entering the kitchen, temporarily distracted from cleaning powdered sugar off her fingers. She’s sprawled out over two chairs at the table, coat still on and scarf draped around her shoulders. Her eyes are a little bloodshot – it is, after all, slightly too early in the morning – still alert, but she forces down a yawn as she gestures at the chair opposite her.

“You’re up early. C’mon, sit down.” She picks another pastry out of the box in front of her, then gives the box a gentle, almost reverent push across the table by way of invitation. “Passed by the Bakkersstraat on my way home.” Biting into the dough, she sends up a little cloud of sugar. “You know the one with those white tiered displays in the window, Fortuin? They have those little spiced cookies and probably the best babka this side of the True Sea. Don’t know what time they get up, but I can’t smell that dough in the morning and not buy something.”

THE SLAT IS A LEANING HOUSE OF CARDS: drooping rooftop propped up by spindly limbs and crookedly wrought beams, each level cascading slipshod into the other like it could give way to the canals underneath with a strong wind. There are holding cells in Kerch more welcoming than the Slat — prisons drier, sturdier, with thicker walls and consideration for internal heating. Yet the Crows and Dregs and all the rest of Brekker’s wayward flock congregate here like the safety the Slat offers means something. When the world outside holds a dagger to your throat and calls it commerce, a place where you can sleep with eyes closed and fists empty is worth its weight in kruge. Even if it does leak. 

Each creak of shadowed footstep and battered floorboard seems to be holding its breath on his behalf. Trespasser, the walls groan and whisper, traitor. You don’t belong here. It’s true, after all — despite Brekker’s deal, despite the Lieutenant’s vigilance boring holes into him whenever he’s in line of sight — he isn’t one of them. Not truly. He’s less than a ghost here, less than a spectre or a haunting. 

The scent of warm sugar and freshly baked goods curling through the lower level of the house sinks its teeth in him, drags him from the ground swell of wandering doubt into the present. Out of habit or custom, instinctive preventative measure, he lingers in the doorway to survey the room and take the measure of every face before he steps through.  “Technically, I don’t live here.”  He blinks down at the source of the mouth-watering lure of sugar and butter and pastry, wondering briefly if it would be considered bad manners to suspect the box of being poisoned. You could never be too sure with the Dregs, and up until recently, Sev — and the comrades-in-arms of his ilk and station — were their natural enemies.   

THE SEA HAS BEEN THE FIXED HORIZON of an unchartered country ever since he first saw a map unfurled before him for the first time. ketterdam had always seemed like it held the entire world in its fist, pieces of everywhere floating into the harbour from all corners of land, desert and ice like flotsam and debris. poring over a cartographer’s painstakingly detailed map, he’d studied the borders of the true sea with avid focus, noted the winding border of shu han and the names of each port city that lined its shores. for a man living in a port city and a bustling hub of sea trade, sev had only boarded a ship a handful of times and always for business. for work, the few times a valuable witness had proven to be a flight risk, and the bounty on their head was too high to afford cutting their losses. 

the look on his face as his eyes skim the length of the dock, across the skiffs and barges carrying passengers and exports, is one of resting indifference. but the look in his eyes, to any sailor, any soul that’s tasted the sea and salt air and never found peace on land again, is one of undeniable longing. a touch of fatal wanderlust, even. the kind that drove you away from home and safe harbour and all that you knew, and sent you tumbling into the arms of danger and certain death, daring and untold adventure. 

“               so which one’s yours?”