NOT LUCK. ALL SKILL.

JESPER FAHEY | 25 | SHARPSHOOTER

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JESPER FAHEY  ━━  @spinthebarrel

Come nightfall, Kaz’s plan to infiltrate Henrik’s estate would be set in motion; everyone had their roles assigned and detailed, what was necessary of them to accomplish if the other groups had any chance at success themselves. A precariously balanced house of cards, as most of the bastard’s schemes seemed to be ━━ finely tuned and providing little room for error, a display of trust in each of those who called themselves crow. 

In what few hours remain of daylight, the ratways are a quiet bustle of activity and preparation. While Sigyn’s role was a predictable one ( keep dregs alive and in fighting condition ), she hadn’t expected to be part of what Kaz had called the ‘main combat force’. And so she sits atop one of the tables strewn about the tunnels, her legs dangling over the end, passively alternating back and forth. Her bones were scattered on the tabletop at her side, and into them she looks, trying to derive any last minute warnings from the shapes they formed; as excited as she was to turn the tides on Henrik and his drüskelle, even she couldn’t outright deny the anxiety that came with the task ahead. 

Weaving mindlessly strands of her hair to braids, her attention is drawn from the bones’ patterns, to where she hears approaching footsteps  ━━  it was Jesper. The bundle of nerves that had curled itself into the pit of her stomach prevents her usual response to his company ( an exasperated sigh, the rolling of eyes, the searching for an excuse to take her leave) and instead she questions, after a breath of hesitation, “are you ready?”

the pulse of blood in ears, the thrum of the air, expectation that curls and coils into every limb and every breath. this was where they lived, where they thrived, where they found purpose, where expectation came easy as rain off the shore and the one thing jesper knew that he could always deliver.

still, the energy builds and builds and has yet to dissapate, nowhere to channel, stored into muscle and finger twitches, so jesper walks holes into the floor, carving the tunnels ever deeper with each pass, everyone else too focused for jesper to find it worth disturbing them.

a longer pass, further through the corridor, fingers dancing on the walls and a vague check up with everyone, past the last and then past sigyn. he doesn’t want to deal with tension taut aggravation, doesn’t want to be thing that snaps the wire, edges lashing out involuntarily. but she doesn’t, an empty breath, fingers wrapped around strands of hair, and jesper slows, stops, tries desperately to cast a rein on his own amped up emotions.

Jesper wasn’t wrong on that point, and her acknowledgement of it emerges as an exasperated huff. For as desperate as she was for a moment of rest after surviving the night, with their numbers already threatened by the slat’s fire and the violence that erupted into the streets afterwards, her normal reluctance to tend to every single dreg that dragged themselves to her for relief had to be put aside. They needed as many alive and whole as possible, for as bad as tonight had been, there was a collective knowing that it was all so very far from over.

The jurda settles into her system quickly, dashing across interwoven networks of nerves, bright and electric to the tips of her fingers, webbing across every inch of her skin ━━ he’d gotten a hold of a impressive batch, that much she was sure of. The blanket of exhaustion lifts entirely from her shoulders, replaced instead with a jittering vibrancy, a momentum born of thin air to go. do stuff. walk around. heal things. find people. maybe gather supplies and organize by size and color everything they had. anything at all, as long as she was moving around. 

She reaches first back into his lap for the jerky, which somehow manages to be softer than the bread had been as she bites into it. “Well, certainly not anymore. Here,” she offers the packet and it’s remaining blossoms back to him, “staying up all night sounds a lot less daunting once it kicks in.”

A tilt of the head, a common tic of hers made distinctly sharper with the stimulant. “I’m not, really. But Kaz would be suspicious if you did happen to die in your sleep and I didn’t catch it. If I am going to let you die, it’ll have to be a little more believable than this.”

is this what he looks like normally? eyes bright and fingers almost quivering with energy? he’s been accused of drinking seven cups of coffee for his energy source before (and he has drunk that much, but if anything it calmed him and that was just another mystery in the equation that was jesper), but perhaps jurda is a closer descriptor, the field in which he first learnt to spell. (this too, is not a joke, his first word a swear, his first word written by causing the flowers to bloom early, to the vibrant laughter of his mother)

he declines the blossoms, pushing it back into her hand. ‘ i was carrying them around for kaz, they’ll send me to sleep quicker instead. just gotta take a breath and get my head into the mood, and i’ll be up all evening anyway. ‘ kaz has probably found another source anyway, though nothing ever as good as the jurda from the fahey farm, but jesper’s sure there’s another packet tucked somewhere into one of these pockets.

THE SLAT BURNS AS THE DREGS SCATTER INTO BEDLAM AND FLAMES. @spinthebarrel

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 red-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. 

“Jesper? That you?”   He grasps at his baton, slams it into the back of the other drüskelle’s head, the poor bastard having spun around to gape at the perfectly timed distraction. As Jesper comes into view, Sev’s face breaks out into a smile, streaked with soot and heady relief.   “Saints, that was close. Suppose I owe you one now.”

water doesn’t stop fire. this is a lesson hard learnt by most, bowl splashed onto oil embers that do nothing but steam and continue burning. fire consumes and devours, unless suffocated, completely drowned. but there are too many bodies in these canals, and the fire only leaps ever higher.

jesper darts from person to person, helping and protecting and deflecting and shooting, but time has stretched thin and immaterial, order and structure blurred by the haze of ash and smoke. wet wood burns into dark smoke, the stench of mildew and dirt thick in the lungs. this is not the worst they have ever seen, not a tank smashing through a wall of ice, but the screams are echoing, the noise deafening, and there are too many people to try and save, too many shadows to try and kill.

a baby cries, shrill noise of survival that cuts through the air, but it takes too many heartbeats to locate it’s source, direction twisted in the darkness, before jesper catches sight of a woman and babe fleeing, and a fight right next to it. peering, they have to wipe their eyes of ash to see, to be able to place which is friend and which is foe. ah saints it’s sev, and jesper has his gun raised and shooting before he thinks, shoots once to kill, once for security and once more because he’s pissed.

all three hit, center mass, aimed perfectly to not hit sev even as they were grappling, dancing in and out of the line of fire. smooth as sigh, jesper spins the revolvers, slots bullets back in, curses at the rapidly decreasing weight of his pouch. apparently, as he’s doing so, sev takes out another druskelle, the only indication the sickening thwack as it cracks the flesh and skull, before collapsing.

‘ nah, it’s kaz, decided to steal some guns and become a crack shot. ‘ jesper puts on a voice, before dropping it, shaking his head. ‘ honestly? i wouldn’t put it past him to be a secret zowa who controls luck itself or something of the sort. ‘ his guns slot back into their holsters, and he steps forwards, eyes scanning the street for someone else to help. but it’s nothing but shadows darting across the streets at the moment, and jesper takes the moment to reach out, to clasp the others forearm.

it’s not that he’s claustraphobic, not scared of the weight of the earth and a thousand houses pressing down from above them, unsettled, perhaps, of the narrow sightlines, the lack of view. crow that’s never sat happy in a cage, bird’s eye views and thousand-yard shot. a knife fits better in these underground streets than a gun for any distance, and the lack of sky draws his breath in shallower than they would like.

still, they settle, they get used to doing the rounds, thankfully able to climb out and return home through the open-air streets, no matter how overcast ketterdam is. inej had long shown him an easy roof-top path to home, and that is where he’s planning on going when he comes across yana, decides to be the irritating love he’s known for being.

Fides scrubs his face and listens to Jesper’s account. The way they tell it leaves just enough to the imagination. It’s hardly a surprise. In the handful of years he’d known the gunslinger they’d always been quite the storyteller. ( If the pantomimist didn’t admire it so much, he may well recall a time he was as effortless with his own words, and green with envy. )

If not for the fresh terror of its subject matter, it would be a story worth sinking into. He thinks he’ll do so anyway as he pauses in his cleaning and sits back on his heels. A lantern flickers by his shoe, left at the basin to light the makeshift washroom. As Jesper speaks to the forms that flickered with the shadows and smoke, and Fides can’t resist leaning toward it. He laces his fingers together. Shapes and reshapes them, puppeteer to shadow-figures on the walls while they contemplate the carnage left in their wake:

A wolf takes shape in silhouette, mouth hinging open as if at the behest of the drüskelle above.

“Damned dogs,” he bares his teeth.

The wolf twists into a hare, legs springing out. “but we were quicker than them, where it counted,” follows his weary, optimistic decree

Then the pantomimist’s brows knit in the center as he contemplates what becomes of them next. What might be asked, once the smoke clears, of the messenger he becomes where the dregs are concerned. In thought, he interlocks his palms and curls the knuckles carefully, opposing thumb and forefinger forming the wide-brimmed hat of a shadow-made man. On the wall, Henrik von Der Leyen turns his head. With a shake of his own, Fides rends the figure in two as Jesper draws to a close.

“We always do,” he echoes the words as if he’s borrowed them from someone else. As if the believing is still slouching its way to the ratway to join them. In the flickering lamplight, he shapes a final shadow puppet crow. “Kaz will draw up a plan,” he nods firmly, “If he hasn’t already.” Chuckles as he shakes his hands out and then pivots back to the basin to finish scrubbing. Once he’s rubbed his face near raw, Fides surfaces from the wash-water and puffs out his cheeks. Sighing, wiping the thick droplets weighing down his lashes. “Better?” He asks as he tilts his face to Jesper for their eye on the matter.

as jesper finishes their recounting, arms folded to stop the injuries from jostling, their brow unfurls as they watch the shadows take form, animals that echo the brutality that had just occured upside. few have such talents for stage and entertainment, stories told in every line of his body, rather than just his words, doing away with sound to transcend the form. ( if the sharpshooter didn’t admire it so much, he would wish for that same talent, go green with envy )

wolf that bounds across the walls, leaps on prey, which narrowly escapes. when are the dregs not going to be chased? when can their power be something concrete and sanctuary? or is ketterdam and this world too determined to chew up and spit out any possibility of a deep breath, of not needing to look over your shoulder for every dark silhouette?

fides echos the hope, as insubstantial as that sound, and it’s hard not to have faith shaken loose and left behind, scrambling to catch up. it’s only the knowledge that, in the same way lady luck has never shown jesper her hand, she cavorts with kaz, has seen the miracles unfold over the years.

‘ a thousand plans, and dismissed a thousand more, no doubt. ‘ jesper huffs a laugh, knows that those plans will also ultimately come to nothing, a contingency mixed with a different backup mixed with the gullibility of the world will be what ultimately carries them through. a sleight of hand to the universe, and they get out with their lives and more than they could have ever imagined.

It drowned all sound. The flames cracking wood as though it was bone, heat and sweat attaching all ash to his skin. Shots, fired. Close. It rang in his ears and made it harder for him to listen, to understand. In the back of his mind, Manu thought he heard screams. In reply to the everlasting prayer of curses he kept on chanting. Deep down, he wondered just how much damage he was doing instead of helping. For water wasn’t supposed to burn, even though it did now. The cold beauty of it strapped naked and gone. No longer in control of its own violence.

Wrong. That was how he felt as his arms kept steady control of the water. Cursed. The one word that place seem to shout back at him. Why couldn’t it be an earthquake? A good old fashioned tsunami or something? Maybe even a tornado. A swift, quick death. Not this agonizing bullshit that made him seek the connection he cherished not for how it soothed him, but for how it allowed him to command that water, shape it to his need and guide it to the flames.

Because it was no longer there. The humming of power, the lifeline. Though Manu never had a formal education as some did in Ravka, his mother taught him to listen. To feel the water around him, to let it be as much a part of him as his hair, hands, eyes. It is in us, she used to say, as much it is around us. And so he learned to find it. In the air, on the ground, covering skin, filling canals and rivers and ponds and pools and seas and oceans. Even though Manu couldn’t control more than a slight fraction of it, couldn’t bend it to his will as much as water couldn’t bend him.

It was wild. Other. Beautiful. Cruel. And it was gone with the fire. Turned steam, turned absent. The mere realization causing his arms to fall, the loud noise of bullets filling the roar in his ears. Alongside a voice, a face. Jesper. “Oh, you beautiful creature,” Manu almost shouted, hands going back up, eyes fixed on its movement. “I could kiss you right the fuck now just for being alive, but I’ll take the keeping me alive offer gladly,“ he snarled, a smile gone wrong as he couldn’t master the playful tone he went for. Twisted and backwards. That was the result of this djelforsaken fire. "And if you could do that while killing as many drüskelle as you possibly can find, next drinking night is on me,” though now he smiled, viciously, as he coughed the smoke and watched the water falter in its path for his broken control.

“If I survive, that is,” Manu frowned, the words more to himself than to Jesper. That particular morbid turn didn’t need to reach all ears. It could stay with him, his prayers and his water. “I got out with Fides… I think he’s alright,” Manu started, voice hoarse from smoke. “I know Kaz is out too, came here to give me orders,” he chuckled, the very definition of the barrel boss found in between those words. “But… do you think there’s more? Inside, I mean.”

---

the enthusiasm in manu’s voice takes them back a bit, but immediately they’re grinning back with teeth just as sharp, for wickedness is the only thing on the air right now, the fire twisting smoke and steam into illusions and false reflections throughout the streets, order flipped.

‘ well, i could never say no to anyone who’s greeted me that enthusiastically! ‘ jesper slots into place, just off and behind the other grisha, eyes scanning the streets behind manu’s back. they take a second to refill his revolvers, no time to be able to do anything with the slight bending from heat, the scuff marks from having been forced to drop one, and after his first shot he can already tell that there’s no way to truly compensate for it just yet, other than by lashing his power into every single bullet.

they get one in the head, another in the shoulder, wishes he’d been able to stay on the roofs with a rifle, would be able to see through this haze. ‘ hey, if we get out of this, i’m getting kaz to give everyone a night of free drinking. make those sankt-forskaen summoners pay for it. ‘ tone for tone, acid for acid, nudges his shoulder against manu’s.

his power has use, sure, his strength, better than nothing, but to be zowa without the ability to heal his friends? to hear the rasp in manu’s voice, be able to do nothing about his home crashing down behind him? he could make every flower bloom beneath the cracks in the street, could leech the colour from the buildings, but combating this raw chaos of nature? shot, shot, second goes wide and only clips the druskelle. jesper fires again, snarls as the fucker finally goes down. working alongside it is the best he can do.

Working a second bite of bread between her teeth, she listens as his words dwindle, fading away through the air into the humming quiet of the tunnels. Was he really that worried about surviving should he decide to try and rest? It gives her a moment’s pause, and for the first time since he stumbled into her space, takes account of him with healer’s eyes. Jesper certainly had managed to get his brain bounced against that thick skull of his at some point during the night. While she didn’t get the sense that it would lull him into a wakeless sleep should he lay down, the possibility still clearly weighs on him. Sigyn sighs in consideration, a wary sound, though improved since the growling in her stomach had ceased.

She plays idly with the packet of jurda between her fingers, before deciding to go ahead and  unfold one of the blossoms from it’s wrapping. Popping it into her mouth, she corrects his offer to defend her nap, “you’re too friendly to stop someone from bothering me. If they come by limping and dripping blood, sad eyes, sadder story, you’ll cave and wake me yourself. So.. steam and supplements, it is.” The fatigue she had felt marrow-deep in her bones slowly begins to lift, the tension in her jaw relaxing as the sweetened rush of energy from the blossom begins spreading throughout her blood. Pleased, she gets up onto her feet and closes the space between her and Jesper in two short paces. She looks downward at him, and pokes him straight in the forehead with a finger, letting her abilities ease his concern and repair what he’d jostled. “There.” “….and let me have the jerky, too.”

he goes to defend his honour, before scoffing and realising ‘ you’ve got a point there. but that’s only because i know you’d be more mad if i didn’t. ‘ he watches as she fiddles with the packet, before coming to a decision and taking some. should he take one? normally, he doesn’t need it, more than enough energy that ricochets him from the walls till he falls asleep, calmer now but more vibrant and with a bigger energy pool now that he uses his power regularly. do normal people feel like this constantly?

but she stands and he holds back a sigh, ready to watch the jurda and sigyn walk away from him, his presence apparently untolerable for her for more than a bite of a conversation. he’ll get up soon, take a breather, but her finger pokes into his forehead and his gaze snaps up, eyes wide with surprise.

cooling nerves, a tension at the back of his skull he wasn’t even aware of, softening and easing washed over him, and he cannot help the choked sigh of relief, before he rolls his head and cracks about seven different things in his neck. ‘ of course, of course of course. the jerky is more than yours, but you really didn’t have to do that. i was talking more of the fact that neither of us are gonna be able to sleep anyway for the rest of the night, things to do, you know. ‘

the strain is palpable to aleni, pulling her power taut as a rubber band as she feeds it all into jesper. whether it’s the tough work of the job they’re doing or exhaustion settling into their bones after just running for their lives, she isn’t exactly sure. but the ominous creak of the ceiling tells her they can’t stop, can’t give into that throbbing ache, not yet.

she tries to find jesper’s grin reassuring, but jesper would probably grin through the apocalypse and come out the other end still acting cheeky. aleni makes herself believe him, though, because what other choice does she have right now? thinking about how she could end up crushed in a caved-in tunnel? not at all helpful to the situation. so she keeps her focus on letting jesper draw from every ounce of energy she has. this is what she was made for, and it had better fucking keep her alive.

slowly, steadily, the creaks and groans surrounding them begin to mute. the sounds of destruction from above start sounding more and more distant, less threatening from their position down below. “jesper. are we- is that it?” she’s starting to feel safer, but she doesn’t have the fabrikator senses that jesper does.

time stretches away from them, meaningless, taffy sugar strands that melt and loop and turn fine and sticky, dragon’s breath candy or sugarfloss, edging into forever, looping back into nothing but this single heartbeat.

she doesn’t say anything in response, and he has nothing to say to that silence, or perhaps he simply hasn’t given her long enough, or perhaps she has no energy left to say anything, what with how he’s drinking and dragging up every last part of it, following the seams down through the stretch of the tunnel, awarness spreading fine and thin to shore up their lifeboat of tunnels.

her power has always turned his strength into something new and unknown, experiments where her hand caused a sudden fluctation of the material and colour of everything within the room, to a hole in the room from a single small bullet that had left a gap the size of a dining room table. this time, his awareness goes thin, lanky and bird-like, subtly reinforces everything his awareness can reach, before slowly drawing back, back into himself, back into time and his body and pain, called back those last few meters by her voice.

in all the years she’s known jesper, she’s never known them to miss a shot.

when you think jesper fahey, you think: dazzling charm, pearl revolvers, terrible luck. those who know him more intimately can add a fourth: fabrikator. abysmal luck on the tables always translated into good fortune on the battlefield. she’s never known a sharpshooter like him. but they’ve never gone up against two summoners of legend, two summoners with an air of the unnatural around them. there isn’t time to ask them if they’re thinking what she is. somehow in the silence, she knows their thoughts are one, interwoven in memory and panic from the past.

yanked up, nina hears the bullet make contact - and knows it immediately is not enough. most second army trained grisha know how to conjure with one hand now - part of basic training. “remind me to loan him out to you for the day when we make it out of here.” she shoots back, momentarily forgetting she was the one who left matthias in the gloom, heart in his hands. 

“you should ask them to give your bullets back. seems only fair.” jesper had his shot, now she’ll take her turn again.

once again, she dives into the deep dark depths. once again, the summoner bests her, wipes out her paltry undead army and sends a blazing orb of light in her direction. just quick enough on her feet, nina dives out of the way, nothing battered but her pride. “okay, now i’m really starting to get pissed off.”

before jesper goes down that happy imagining, a cuddle pile infront of the fireplace or something steami - nope, this is not the time to picture nor consider the chances that wylan would say yes, nor the fact that whilst an attractive thought wy is all that they’ll ever need, and like the thought of him summons him, there’s a spark of bombs in the background, coloured explosions he must have left behind.

wonders also, for a second, whether nina knew, all this time - but no, no-one could have faked that kind of heartbreak. but when were they reunited, and how, to what end? the dead crawl out of the ground and jesper retorts ‘ i’m holding you to that! ‘

he huffs a laugh at the suggestion, the idea of asking ‘scuse me, stop for a moment, i’ve just gotta pick up my amunition, shift it back into firing form, they shoot you full of holes with it, do you mind? ‘ you and me both. ‘ pissed off, and there’s still too much going on behind them, and the fight has lasted for barely thirty seconds and yet already drags. this time, they’ll end it.

“yes, hello. it’s me,” wylan says, thought and reason rattled loose in his head like a tooth, pushed out of place by the afternoon’s sheer shock. he doesn’t move as jesper’s hands, always the most confident thing about him, flit over him like nervous butterflies. lets the gunslinger process his presence however they need to, and does his best to ignore the urge to lean into them, tuck his face into their shoulder like a child, present company be damned. instead, he stands up straighter. catches one of jasper’s hands and brings it to his cheek, light enough they barely make contact, and lets his fingers ‘round their wrist– tight as a vice, wrought with unease and concern and a dozen unspoken questions– do the talking for him. “and i’ve done something dreadful to my coat.”

logically, he knows it’s in his best interest to stay calm. to not deflate like spun caramel in a heatwave, not when he’s the one who has lost the least out of the entire gathered party. jesper can afford to take liberties, his guns speaking where his hard-won reputation doesn’t already, but wylan… half the dregs eye him like he’s still got his milkteeth in, the sheep who wandered into the wolf’s den at lunchtime. trailing after brekker like his personal pied piper. “if anything, i was my own biggest menace, at least in terms of personal safety– the bombs, well. they could use some fine tuning. they’re… volatile.” 

he blinks, the moment burned into his memory and retinas, when he’d reached up to throw one of the small, sparking marbles– and the thing had gone off in his hand instead. absently, he pushes his singed fingertips deeper into his pocket, remembering the flash, and the emerald pigment settling, garish, against his burnt skin. he’d added color to the bombs as part of their testing, different shades matched to each tweaked composition. the idea was to measure the spread of the smoke by how far each pigment reached, once the air had cleared and the heavier particles floated to the ground. now, instead of some out-of-the-way field splattered in multicolor, it’s the right side of his coat lit up in a blaze of turquoise, his left hand and wrist painted magenta. not to mention he’d bet a decent wager, going off the nimbus just outside his line of sight, that his right cheek will be stained neon orange for at least a few days.

still, he can’t help himself, so he slips a hand under jesper’s coat, resting it on their side with a squeeze. not quite an embrace, but maybe something parallel. maybe something close enough. “actually– give me yours? your coat.” he feels like a warning flare, all lit up and drawing odd looks, too clearly out of place. sets his teeth, and steps closer to jesper. “and can we get out of here? get me out of here. please.”

they cannot touch him, to see the apparation switch into something real and injured, or something false and empty, leaving jesper only sick with worry or desperate for reassurance, to touch him is to break the possibilities and solidify them into something potentially worse and jesper is too wracked with exhaustion to cope.

but the fingers wrap around their wrist, the back of their hand, and jesper lets out a shudder exhale as their fingers trace his cheek, firm, gentle, feels the echo of worry in the tightness of his grasp. they let out a shaky laugh at the comment, stock still as they let wylan lead the movement, desperately wishes to throw themself ontop him, to pull him close and wrap their hands through his hair, to -

their fingers brush at the dusting of colour on his face, the orange and the touch of blue at his jaw, rub at the dirt that’s high on his cheekbone. they cannot bring themself to speak, certain that as soon as they start the words will continue to torrent out, a dam burst, and wylan is too tense, ramrod back, discomfort screaming from every edge of his body. jesper will not make him anymore uncomfortable than he is, and introducting wylan to public affection was a slow long process, and jesper wasn’t going to betray his trust here.

but wylan presses closer and jesper lets out another shuddering breath, feels their chest expand in mirror, as close as decently possible. then wylan is asking, and the tone of his please squeezes their chest, robs them of anything but the ability to do anything wylan asks. silently, immediately, jesper has their coat shucked off, then drapes it across wylan’s shoulders, ontop of his existing coat, doesn’t even register the flare of pain as their arm moves too quickly, wraps their good arm around his waist and immediately has him pull away from the main corridors, of all the people watching out the corner of their eyes.

For a brief moment, the corner of her mouth twitches upwards, producing the faintest of smiles in return. She would, of course, blame it on how completely drained of energy she was, but there was a part of her that knew all too well that smile of his was a dangerously infectious thing, try as she might to prove otherwise. In her ongoing quest to figure out what exactly it was that Jesper was good for ( what it was that Kaz saw in him that made the gunslinger worth everything he’d risked to protect him ), she did have to wonder if that had something to do with it. 

But then, his speaking continues, and as quickly as it had appeared, it vanishes again, her shoulders dropping right along with it. A pout replaces the short-lived curve, lips pursing together in irritation at the implications he makes. Since arriving at the ratways, she’s been mending wounded dregs left and right; burns that penetrate to the muscle, bullets that tore jagged pathways through limbs and organs, and ━━ most curiously ━━ the wounds caused by the shadow summoner, and their uniquely stubborn resistance to her abilities.

She was well aware that her work for the night wasn’t over, but with every stitch of tissue, every vessel coaxed to close, she felt her focus slipping further and further into a dizzying blur of fatigue. Pace was the trick, and if she had any intention of remaining useful, a nap was suddenly not a frivolous thing at all. “I should be,” she finally states, without a hint of reservation, willing to take the gamble.

His hands earn her full attention as they rummage through his clothing for something edible, her eyes following closely everything he places into his lap, brightening when the packet of jurda was added to the pile. “I’m still not sure, honestly. But maybe now, I take you for a squirrel. Which… is an improvement.”  

She leans herself closer to where he sits, reaching now to help herself to the offerings. She chooses the piece of bread first to address the growing in her stomach, and, of course the packet of jurda. Settling back down to sit, she takes a bite of the bread, having to aggressively yank a chunk free with her canine, it’s crust quite a bit harder than it appeared, raining crumbs down into her lap. She inspects the packet as she chews, her mood lightening with the solution it offered, "this may solve the nap issue altogether.”

she smiles back, and thats a victory he viciously hoards, pride and satisfaction and pleasure curling up and purring at the base of his spine, that he had made sigyn smile at him. small as it is, before it shutters away, but he doesn’t let that abate the knowledge that he’s done it once, he can do it again.

he nods at her response, easy as you please, hums a reply. “ you look like you need it. not injured yourself though, was more my meaning, but i definitely ain’t gonna be letting my eyes close for fear till - “ he trails off, picks up the stick and begins peeling off the bark, for sheer something to do with his hands. when can he rest? this night is still young and there are people to take care of and he is scared of sleeping with a concussion, seen too many people slip away in their sleep, but none of it’s serious enough to worry the healers about till the morning.

the statement trails off and he shrugs, flashes a sharp grin at the squirrel comment instead. he settles back against the wall as she begins to eat, wincing a bit at the obvious staleness. in hindsight, he hadn’t checked how old it had been when he’d tucked it into his pocket this morning, but there were no feasts to choose from in this moment. hindsight, preparation, he’s grown slack in comfort, too used to the dregs being unchallenged, relying on the mythos of kaz brekker, too comfortable in his own skill.