Thanks @carolinawrenn for the tag – the last seven lines I wrote. I started this thing in the holidays, got about 1k in, and then realised I needed to start at a different place – so I cut all of it except for this bit, which turns out to be precisely 7 lines!

Kaz looked as if he’d slept for a couple of hours, maybe less. It gave a bad impression to people who didn’t know him very well. Mama had said, He looks like he got trapped in a cave for fifteen years. Inej hadn’t been much bothered by this, except the next time she’d had to explain that it was permanent. If Kaz was tired, he wasn’t acting it. There was the barest excited glint in his dark eyes, if you knew how to look. When Inej had asked where they were going, he’d simply said, “You’ll see,” and he’d been so pleased with himself that she hadn’t had the heart to press it.

Typically, I have since started writing up notes for something else which I can’t stop thinking about. But this one will happen eventually!

The thrift store entrance is down an alley and threw a curtain, the least inviting visage possible but it gets the job done and keeps most people away. Tamao prefers that, the quiet and the solitude, the lack of eyes on him while he peruses the racks, scanning the fabric over while keeping an eye out for anything that might appeal to him. He likes a certain style, slouchier and softer than most; he hasn’t missed the way his friends whisper words like hobo behind his back but he doesn’t so much mind because it’s not inaccurate. It’s just what he happens to like and what works for him the most.

A lack of customers gives him another bonus; when he inevitably drifts toward one of the racks in the corner, there is no one there to give him a look for it, ask him if he might be shopping for someone else. This afternoon, only the clerk is here; a bored college student, her hair left loose and flowing around her shoulders, eyes focused on the textbook in front of her while she makes notes on a pad at her elbow. Tamao could walk out with half of the shop in his pocket and he doubts she would even notice, but he likes it that way. It gives him a certain anonymity and it isn’t like he has that anymore else.

Everyone around here knows his name, after all.

And this isn’t something he can admit to the others, at least not yet while the question is still lingering in his mind, the temptation too strong but not yet given into. He eyes the clerk for a moment just the same before stretching out a hand, fingers ghosting over soft worn material. The fabric is worn thin just like he likes it, the fabric a dark, dark blue closer to purple than black and he can tell without having to take it off of the hanger that it would be lighter than air especially during the summer months when the humidity sticks like a second, irritable skin.

Complete • 31.6k words • Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa; Kaz Brekker & Jesper Fahey & Wylan van Eck

“What was it you said to me once?” Kaz asked. “It’s perfectly acceptable for one country to exercise its sovereign right to get rich by undermining the sovereign laws and rules of other countries?” He leaned back and crossed his legs, bad over good, and brought his cigarette to his mouth. “And it’s not even the country getting rich. It’s me.”

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I. I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay. I looked to heaven, and tried to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came, and made My heart as dry as dust. I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay dead like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet. The cold sweat melted from their limbs, Nor rot nor reek did they: The look with which they looked on me Had never passed away. An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.

rewatching crows explode and dying over ryohei all over again