Archive of Our Own ^beta

Kaz wakes up in the Reaper’s Barge and wishes he hadn’t.

Bodies, bloating, wet, cold. Pressed in on every side of him. Rotting. He can see some of their faces and he wants to die like they get to.

But the horror is too strong, and he has to get out.

With strength he can’t bring himself to question, he moves the bodies aside and makes his way to the top of the pile. He has to get out.

Where is Jordie?

He looks back down and regrets it immediately, because there is his brother, pale like the rest of them with the pink fire pox marks still covering his face. 

Kaz gags and moves away. He has to get out of the boat, he has to he has to he has to. The abandoned port they left from isn’t too far off. He can do it.

He’s looking around, knowing he’ll need support, and then he hears him.

“Kaz…”

It’s a croak, and he can barely hear it over his own terror, but when he looks back at Jordie, his eyes are open.

He’s alive.

The thought sends Kaz back into the bodies, pushing them aside even as bile rises in his throat. 

He pulls and struggles and Jordie doesn’t have much strength but he tries, blinking in and out of consciousness. He’s deadweight, but as long as he’s alive, Kaz can’t leave him behind. 

Somehow their movement hasn’t been noticed. Or maybe it’s being ignored. Kaz’s strength is fading quickly.

Jordie finally manages to find some strength in his legs and pushes himself up, and he and Kaz fall overboard due to their shakiness, taking a few other bodies with them.

They kick, and they struggle and they grab onto a body, a large man they can both hold onto.

Jordie’s blinking out again, coughing up water. “Kaz?”

“Kick,” Kaz gasps out. “Jordie, kick,”

Kaz tries swimming them to shore, and it takes long, so long, and Jordie is passed out for most of it. The older Rietveld brother tries, goddamnit does he try, but he’s closer to death than Kaz is.

Jordie grabbed onto the man’s shirt, but the man must have been a homeless beggar because his clothing is in scraps, and Kaz is digging his finger into cold bloated flesh as Jordie’s fingers grasp fabric. 

They make it to a beam at the docks they can climb onto, and Kaz pulls himself up first. Jordie’s still in the water.

You can’t get him out. He’s going to die. You’re not strong enough. You’re alive, he’s almost dead. Let him die.

Kaz picks up his brother and pulls, his muscles seizing. He’s crying.

The first time Kaz saves Jordie’s life is the last time he cries. 

Jordie Rietveld lives.

Kaz Rietveld doesn’t.

He sheds the young farm boy he was the way he sheds off his conscience and decency, attacking young and weak school kids for any scrap of money, food, or fresh water. He carries most of it back to Jordie, who spends his day in the back of a quiet alley on old cushions, sheltered by old and empty fruit crates. 

He’s still weaker than Kaz, can barely get up, but his eyes rove over him every time Kaz comes back from his desperate attacks, searching him for damage. He makes noises of concern if Kaz is bruised or bloody, and he reaches out, trying to help. Kaz will push his arms back down, make him drink whatever he finds and feeds him fruit.

Kaz cradles his head to help him swallow. 

Kaz hates touching his brother.

As Kaz gets better, and he gets better fast, he brings in more money and more food. Jordie can stand now, and Kaz starts working odd jobs to get them any sort of housing in the Barrel. 

Kaz’s search for jobs in the Barrel somehow always goes better than Jordie’s did in the Financial District.

He’s a runner for a gambling den, and he watches the players, and he learns how to play. He makes so much money he gets banned in two weeks, but now there’s enough to get them more than a closet.

Jordie rarely leaves the rooms Kaz finds for them, but now that he can stand again, he does what he can. Kaz buys cheap bandages, and whenever he comes back, Jordie pushes himself off from a bed or chair and patches him up.

Kaz hates touching his brother but he doesn’t feel nauseous or dizzy when he does, like he is with others. He hates touching him because he’s furious. His anger is stronger than his despair when he looks at Jordie.

He stamps it down.

He brings Jordie a book. Jordie smiled and Kaz was only angrier.

Kaz doesn’t keep track of time until he realizes, with a glance at a newspaper a boy was selling on the streets, that he’s almost eleven. His 10th birthday had passed, and so had Jordie’s 14th, and he hadn’t noticed.

It doesn’t matter, but he does start keeping track. No use departing that much from reality.

Kaz slowly gets banned from playing in gambling dens all over the Staves, but the floor bosses start paying him to find cheats instead, and what’s what he does for the next year.

And then he sees Jakob Hertzoon.

And then he learns who Pekka Rollins is.

Jordie doesn’t say anything to Kaz the next few nights, because Kaz’s anger at Jordie, at life, has become something else. It’s far bigger, far crueler.

Kaz doesn’t explain anything to him. Jordie doesn’t ask.

Jordie has started working at a small Barrel restaurant in the kitchen. He hides from everyone, hurries home, and leaves out the occasional chocolate for Kaz.

Kaz isn’t angry at Jordie anymore. Kaz eats the chocolate and any sweets he brings him, because there’s no use leaving it go to waste, but eventually he tells Jordie to not bother. If he’s going to get scraps from the restaurant, Jordie should be eating them. 

Kaz has found a gang that needs him. 

Kaz’s gang makes him stronger..

He doesn’t tell Jordie.

Kaz has killed a man.

Kaz has found a new name.

Kaz is wearing gloves.

Kaz moves into the Slat, and Jordie asks to know what Kaz has been doing for the past year, rarely seeing him anymore.

Kaz just shakes his head.

Kaz is fourteen, and he has blood on his hands, and he’s tearing down Pekka Rollins brick by brick. He’s rabid, and people call him Dirtyhands as he beats attackers to death.

Kaz is fifteen, and he has a broken leg and a cane, and he has money. He becomes a lieutenant, and he changes his wardrobe. 

He sits across Jordie at their old room, where only Jordie remains. Jordie stares at him, the crow headed cane that must have cost a fortune, and the new pair of leather gloves.

“Kaz? What are you doing?” he asks. “You look…”

Kaz waits. 

“Like a businessman,”

“That’s the point,” Kaz says. “What do you think about Ketterdam, Jordie?”

“Miserable,”

Kaz hands him a paper, and Jordie looks it over.

“A train ticket?”

“To Lij,”

Jordie looks back up at him sharply. “Kaz, there’s nothing—”

“The ticket is for two days’ time. You have a promised job at an inn, and a room,”

“Don’t be ridiculous. What about you?”

“What about me? I’ll stay here,”

“But—”

“I have stuff to do, Jordie. If you won’t go, I’ll knock you out and place you on the train myself,”

Jordie’s face falls, and Kaz isn’t angry and he isn’t even sad. He has a parlay at 12 bells, and he can’t be late.

He leaves his brother to pack.

Jordie goes, and Kaz doesn’t say goodbye, He pays a new Dime Lion spider to make sure Jordie makes it there and is received, and then he kills the spider when he gets back. 

Jordie is far away, and Kaz Rietveld is finally fully engulfed by Dirtyhands. 

“Who’s Jordie?” Jesper asks him, and Kaz recoils.

Who’s Jordie?

Kaz doesn’t know. It had come out without his approval, he hadn’t even realized there was a scrap of him on his mind.

Kaz hasn’t seen Jordie since just after he turned fifteen, and every day he gets closer to being 18 and reaching 3 years without a sentence of communication to his older brother. The lady who runs the inn writes to him and sends him Jordie’s letters, but he doesn’t open them, only hers. She tells him he’s alive, tells him to visit from his job, and Kaz just sends money her way and moves on. 

Kaz is seventeen years old.

Pekka Rollins is begging on his knees, and Kaz remembers the day his anger at his older brother found a new target.

He’d come to terms a long time ago that Jordie had been a blind, stupid pigeon. They were made of different stuff, him and his brother. Kaz had been broken, but he had gotten up as shattered as he was. Jordie had stayed in his room, stayed in bed, until he’d melded himself back together and the sharp edges had been smoothed out, but he was left more fragile than he had been while Kaz was only stronger. 

Jordie hadn’t been made for Ketterdam, but Kaz, despite his anger and despite how he looked at the innocent and naive kids who now came to Ketterdam just like he had so many years ago, still blamed Pekka.

Pekka, who had taken everything from them, blind to the monster Kaz would become, who hadn’t realized that when he didn’t see a job through himself, it would always come back to bite him.

Brick by brick. Kaz shredded Pekka’s life to pieces for what he had done, what he had made them, for the memories that haunted him even when his Wraith was bleeding out in his arms.

(Inej was so different from Jordie, but their near-death bodies in his arms sometimes blurred, and he couldn't escape it no matter how far he ran). 

Ketterdam is Kaz’s. and his Crows are spread out.

But somehow, he isn’t alone. He had thought that after the Ice Court, after they took down Van Eck and went their opposite ways, there would just be Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, Bastard of the Barrel. 

And yet it isn’t like that. He’d surrounded himself with the strongest people he knew, and somehow they had made strong bonds that didn’t seem to break nor bend no matter where they went.

Kaz gets better. He doesn’t need to run how he thought he’d always have to.

Jesper is always close, and so is Wylan, living a double-life in the Van Eck mansion. And although it’s risky and stupid, they never turn him down for a job, even if Wylan has learned to tell Kaz he wouldn’t participate in the worst parts.

Jesper comes by the Slat often, even after he enrolled in university again, and he sits in Kaz’s office and chatters as Kaz looks over ledgers. He's a Dreg's lieutenant now that Kaz is the boss, and somehow Kaz knows Jesper will always be there, strong and energetic. 

Nina and Matthias, who had barely survived his ordeal with the small Fjerdan soldier who had shot him, send him letters.

Kaz hadn’t believed his eyes when the first one arrived, but as he opened it and read it, he couldn’t help but smirk.

Rumors about slaves are shared with him and Inej, any business deals with Kerch and its effects in Ravka are neatly written to him, the occasional promise that so-and-so Grisha in Kerch would help him if he needed, and sometimes, a wayward Little Palace ex-student or young Druskelle made their way into his ranks. Nina told him she’d turn him inside out by pulling out his bones if he did them wrong.

Kaz still isn’t soft on them, but they don’t actually seem to mind and Nina doesn’t show up to exact her revenge. 

For some reason, Matthias always sends him small drawings of trees.

Of course, there is Inej. His Wraith Queen, people call her, although he is more hers than they know.

She is sometimes gone for months at a time, and usually only stays some weeks between trips, but he gets her letters that she sends from all over their part of the world. Occasionally, she tells him what port she will dock at next, and he sends along a letter and a gift. Usually knives and information, and once, a chef who made her Ketterdam waffles while she stayed at a small town in the Wandering Isles.

She laughed at him for that one the next time they saw each other, and he’d held her hand while she did.

She was warm and so bright, so alive, that he could not remember what she looked like when she’d been scared or close to death. 

Occasionally, he also gets letters from her parents. Every time Inej visits them in Ravka, actually, because they send him a letter saying thank you, again and again, for saving their daughter. He doesn’t know what to do, so with Nina and Matthias’ and ‘Sturmhond’s’ help, he sends money and tools and the occasional few lines about some Suli proverb Inej had taught him, because despite it all it was something about her he was fond of, and it seemed to be their common ground.

When Inej learns about that for the first time (from teasing cousins, apparently), she kisses him, quick and easy, and Kaz is unbalanced for a very different reason than usual.

Sometimes Kaz wonders how he’s managed to become so close to his Crows.

He watches Wylan headbutt someone that tried to pickpocket him and for some reason, that makes it click. 

None of them are from the Barrel and yet each and every one of them survived it. 

Kaz realizes they’re made of the same stuff he is. 

All of them almost died many times and even though Kaz and Inej are the most broken, they’re all a little messed up, and they all pulled themselves together quickly and kept going. Kaz doesn’t know how they do it, because he knows they didn’t use the same strategy as him, but instead of coming to the Barrel arrogant and with a plan, like Rollins, they came broken and beaten and they made something from themselves, and that’s why even when they’re gone Kaz walks like he still has the strongest crew Ketterdam has ever seen next to him. Because he does, and because they are. 

Kaz hasn’t forgotten Jordie, but since he’d stopped using him as fuel to the fire to bring down Rollins, he goes long stretches of time without thinking of his pale, almost dead body, of looking at him and almost letting him drown before pulling him up. Of wanting to kill him even as he nursed him back to health.

He hardly thinks of him at all, because almost every other memory is now muted and disconnected and not worth thinking about, so he just doesn’t.

He looks at Jesper’s smile and lets his better feelings about Jordie go.

When Kaz is 18, a letter from Jordie arrives, separate from the Inn Keeper’s bundle, and he hesitates, but sets it aside with the stack of letters he’s never opened. What would Jordie say if he replied now? Kaz forgave him, but they don’t have any reason to be near each other.

Kaz is 19 years old when every part of his life crashes back together.

Nina and Matthias are in Ketterdam trying to establish an ex-Druskelle, ex-Second Army colony. While Ravka and Fjerda are slowly changing, it’s too easy a target in either country for the other side, and with their ties to Kerch and its firm neutrality, that’s where they end up.

Inej found a ship full of Kerch-born slaves that were being shipped for Fjerda, who really, really didn’t like Kerch nowadays. She said it was an odd tables-turned event, but would still faithfully bring them back to Kerch.

Wylan’s mom had, as she slowly recovered, demanded to spend an extended amount of time meeting his friends, and when she learns that they’re all converging in Ketterdam once more, she insists Wylan and Jesper take a break.

Kaz, as always, is in Ketterdam, He has the Slat, and the Crow Club, another tavern (from a vote, it had been called the Crow Bar, and Kaz let it happen. Apparently, puns brought business), and a small inn (thanks to another vote, because apparently, Kaz’s popularity within the ranks of his own gang increased whenever he asks their opinions, it had been deemed the Crow’s Nest, which Kaz then decorated with Inej in mind and the image of her in the crow’s nest of her own ship). 

In the last two years, the Barrel has changed. Murder and crimes and spying and lying are still everywhere, but somehow every gang essentially followed Kaz’s example and focused on its businesses. Cutthroat business practices are now more impressive than street fights, which Jesper thinks is hilarious, but occasionally Jesper gets jumped (and saved) and admits that the Barrel is still the Barrel. 

With an inn he owns and his Crows coming back, Kaz empties it to make room for everyone. He would have never done that before, because it showed clear favoritism that he had considered dangerous for a long time, but when he realized that his Crows would never leave him behind, because they were strong and ferocious and they’d taken on a whole town and put their lives into his hands and he hadn’t let them die, he realized there was a crew that the Barrel couldn’t break.

He refuses to be Pekka and make enemies out of monsters that are anything like himself, and his crew and gang never slack, and so when they all convene in one place, he’s not worried. He makes sure everyone is armed and he has his most trusted guards in place, and he knows it’ll be fine. Everyone that matters to him will stay safe.

He thinks he hasn’t forgotten about Jordie. He thought that was the truth. How could he have, after all?

But he has.

Kaz stares at the letters Jesper is handing him. “Why do you have my mail?”

“A runner from the Slat came by with it, since he knows you’re here right now, and I guess he decided I worked just as well to pass it on to,” Jesper grins. “I am your lieutenant, after all,”

Kaz rolls his eyes, looking through the small stack. Bills, business offers, news from Colm Fahey who seems to think Kaz is Jesper’s best friend (he’s not wrong) and always asks him to “please not punch my boy in the face,” which Kaz doesn’t tell Jesper about but secretly thinks is funny.

Kaz turns thoughts like that over in his head, but ever since he realized that even Jesper, who smiles like the sun and had the worst time learning self-control, is still made up of resilience and strength and a mind that will pick itself up even when you keep knocking it down, just like Kaz and the others, he has been more at ease admitting it to himself. 

He gets angry still, defensive, and maybe he always will, but as Inej loves saying about the fact that they all happen to really love waffles, birds of a feather flock together.

One of the letters is from Jordie and Kaz stops and stares. 

“What?” Inej asks him. She doesn’t look at the scribbled words on the back of the envelope until Kaz tilts it towards her to read, and when she does, her face morphs into one of pure confusion.

Kaz Fucking BREKKER or whatever your name is, if you don’t reply to this letter you are going to be in so much trouble. You’re in trouble regardless, but be prepared, you dumbass. I am so fucking mad at you.  - Jordan Rietveld, Lola’s Inn, Lij, Southeastern Kerch.

“What’s with the letter?” Jesper asks. He’d walked away after all the mail to him and went to chat with Nina in the Inn’s lobby/sitting room, but when he noticed Inej and Kaz hadn’t come with him, he’d doubled back.

“Not sure,” Inej tells him.

Kaz thinks about all the letters Jordie has sent him. He’s never opened a single one. They had all been identical, and although he’d paused whenever one arrived apart from Lola the Inn Keeper’s reports, he’d just set them aside. It is the one part of his life in which he has been unthorough, and in truth, it was because Dirtyhands didn’t have time for Jordie anymore.

Clearly, Kaz Brekker is going to have to pay the fallout of now having to deal with Jordan. Kaz almost frowns at his brother’s proper name. It doesn’t fit him. 

He puts the packet of envelopes in one of his large coat pockets and opens a letter from Jordie for the first time in his life. 

Kazimir,

You haven’t replied to a single one of my letters, but you reply to Lola’s?

I know you have a whole thing going in Ketterdam and I know we left on odd terms, but it’s been almost five years. I’ve lost my patience. How? Do I shake sense into you? You dumbass?

I’ll be in Ketterdam on the 9th, you bastard. Six and a half bells in the morning, Fel Station.

Love, Jordie

P.S. Have a chocolate

A chocolate fell out of the envelope and fell onto the table.

Kaz sits down, places the letter on the table, which Inej picks up, and starts rethinking every life decision he’s made.

Jordie isn’t made for Ketterdam. Jordie isn’t made for Dirtyhands.

“Your full name is Kazimir?” Jesper pulls Kaz out of his worst-case scenario mental flipbook.

“What? No,”

“But it says—”

“Jordie used to like telling everyone a different version of my name. Then he’d get everyone fired up with what they thought my name was. No one would believe me when I’d tell them it was just Kaz, so he likely just put it there to annoy me,” Kaz says, and he feels weird analyzing Jordie’s intentions. 

“Huh,” is Jesper’s only reply.

“Today’s the 8th,” Inej says. “Tomorrow is the 9th,”

“Fuck,”

“Have you really not replied to any of his letters in five years?” Jesper asks, looking over the letter again.

Kaz picks up the chocolate. It could be poisoned. He unwraps it and pops it into his mouth. “I haven’t even opened a single one until now,”

It’s quiet for a few seconds before Jesper and Inej start yelling at him.

Jordie Rietveld is 23 going on 24 when he goes back to Ketterdam.

The city is clouded over like it always is, and Jordie misses the sunshine of Lij immediately.

He looks around the platform. He has a feeling it won’t be hard to find his little brother, but he wishes he could spot him in the crowd instead of likely having to search for him.

At the very least rumors travel long, long ways, and Jordie sort of, kind of, maybe knows what to look for.

He starts making his way from the station onto the streets of the Financial District before he pauses. There’s a tall lanky boy, Zemini, he thinks, and a short girl he guesses might be Suli, and they’re staring straight at him.

“Goed morgen?” He ventures, offering a smile he knows is charming.

The boy’s mouth parts in surprise and the girl just stares harder.

“Definitely him,” the boy says. “Holy shit. Holy shit. Inej. It’s him,”

“Yes,” the girl replies. “Jesper, calm down,”

“They look alike. This is too weird,”

“I know,” the girl tilts her head up at him as she walks up. She’s probably one of the prettiest people Jordie’s ever seen, although her eyes are Barrel-jaded. “Follow us, keep your head down. The Barrel is asleep this early, but we don’t need you catching anyone’s attention just in case,”

Jordie backs away. He doesn’t trust anyone in Ketterdam.

The girl considers his hesitance. “He’s not an idiot,”

“He sent us, by the way,” the boy—Jesper—says.

“Right…” Jordie says, looking for anyone who could maybe help him out, any travelers he befriended on the train, but they’ve all long dispersed. 

“You gave him a chocolate, your name is Jordan, his least favorite food is, and I don’t know what this means, ‘Mr. Harses’ fucking sweet potatoes’” Jesper says.

Jordie blinks. “He’s still mad about that? Talk about holding grudges,”

The boy and the girl give each other a look that tells him he’s majorly underestimated whatever he thinks his little brother has been doing in Ketterdam.

He’s ushered through back alleys and skinny streets and at one point they go through someone’s basement. They forced a hat on him, which he grumbles about, and then he’s going through the backdoor of an inn. 

“We’re back!” Jesper calls out. “With… uh. Him!”

“Can I get a better explanation now?” Jordie asks as he watches three people emerge from the stairway. A boy who looked Ketterdam-raised, a Ravkan girl, and a Fjerdan man. 

There was certainly a variety of people, Jordie thinks. 

The Ravkan girl marches right up to him. “Holy fucking shit you’re real?”

He raises a brow and she shrieks. “Shit, no, that’s uncanny,”

“Nina,” the girl, who he thinks is Inej based on what Jesper had said, but he isn’t sure yet. “Calm down,”

“Me, calm down? You’re wound up too. What is it? The eyebrows? The height?”

“Eyes,” the girl admits. 

“The eyes?” Nina peers at Jordie and he leans back, a bit uncomfortable. “Not really, although you’d probably know better,”

The entire group is staring at Jordie like he’s a unicorn. 

A lady in the corner speaks up as she makes her way out of the room. She looks like the Ketterdam boy. “Kids, let the boy sit,”

The freckled boy coughs. “She’s right. Might as well introduce ourselves too,”

They sit at a table and someone comes to take away Jordie’s luggage and coat, taking them upstairs. 

“Nina Zenik,” the Ravkan girl offers her hand. “Weird to meet you,”

He shakes her hand. “Right,”

They go like that in a circle, and he’s introduced to Nina, Matthias Helvar, Wylan Van Eck, Jesper Fahey, and Inej Ghafa.

“And I’m—”

“Jordie,”

“Jordie,”

“Jordan,”

“Jordie,”

“Jordie,”

They all look at Matthias, the only person who’d used Jordie’s proper name.

“What? It feels weird to call him a nickname. I don’t know him,”

Before they can move on with the topic, Jordie interrupts. “Jordie is fine, I only use Jordan on papers. Where’s my brother?”

Now they all look at Inej.

“He saw us off this morning,” she offers. “But Kaz works on his own schedule,”

“Also I think he’s two seconds away from actively punching himself,” Jesper says.

“ Jes,”

They all jump, and Jordie whirls around to where the voice had come from.

Standing by open glass doors that must lead to a secluded parlor room is Jordie’s little brother.

Jordie shoots to his feet, walks up to him faster than he meant to. Kaz seems too tense, like he expects to be punched, and Jordie opens his arms and hugs him.

Jordie is four when his brother is born, and he promises to love the little bundle of fluffy black hair he’s handed by his mother for the rest of his life. Jordie picks “Kaz” for name because it’s small but sounds important to him, like his new baby brother. 

Jordie is seven when his mother dies, wasting away from a sickness that makes her weak and tired and thin, and he cries at the funeral. His little brother is only three years old, and he doesn’t cry, but he holds Jordie’s hand and is attached to him for weeks afterward, hugging him at every opportunity. 

Jordie is eight when he realizes his little brother is different from him. Jordie is smart, he’s sure he is, but he isn’t ‘learn to read by myself’ smart. He was taught by his mother, and he had barely started teaching Kaz because their father was too depressed to do it, but Kaz has taken it upon himself. He sits every day by the window and reads the books their dad used to collect, mouthing out the words. 

He catches up to Jordie’s level quickly.

His handwriting is atrocious though. 

Jordie starts teaching Kaz math when he’s nine and Kaz is five, bringing back scraps of papers with equations on them from the small school in town he attends for half the day. 

One day, Kaz follows Jordie all the way to school, and sits so quietly, and does his work so thoroughly, that the teacher doesn’t realize Kaz is too young to be in the room even when he raises his hand and answers a question. 

Jordie is eleven and he learns Kaz is a bit anti-social, when one of their neighbors, Miss Jona, tells him that Kaz, who had been dropped off while Jordie helped his father with the fieldwork, had disappeared.

They search high and low, even his father, who rarely got worked up anymore, and it isn’t until Jordie sees a shadow in the window of Miss Jona’s attic that he figures out where his brother is. He heads up.

“What are you doing up here? We were looking everywhere for you!”

Kaz bites his lip. “The kids kept pulling me around to play games, but I couldn’t speak to them, so I came here,” he looks around the room. “I like attics. Why don’t we have an attic? I’d live in an attic if I could,”

Jordie frowns. “Why couldn’t you talk to the kids?”

Kaz shrugs and shuffles closer until he can hug Jordie. “Too many of them. Too loud. Too pushy. Can I go home now?”

Jordie picks him up and takes him home, and Kaz makes friends with Miss Jona’s elderly mother on the next visit instead of the other kids. She teaches him to play old-lady card games.

“Hey, Kaz, look at me,”

Kaz looks up at him. His eyes are red, but he isn’t crying, and Jordie feels relief wash over him. His little brother is still so small, and he rarely cries, and it hurts to see it whenever he does. 

“Did you know I love my little brother?” Jordie tells Kaz.

Kaz scrunches his nose, confused, and then the word clicks, realizing he's the little brother. He tilts his head just so, a surprised face he’s made since he was a baby and a ladybug landed on his nose. 

“But the other kids say I’m not worth spending time with” Kaz frowns. “They pushed me around, because I don’t play like they do and talked to the adults instead. I don’t mind that much though…”

“...But?”

“...They say I should stop following you around because you’ll get sick of me,”

Jordie frowns. “I’ll never get sick of you. And I don’t play like they do either. I like to read more than I like to run around and hit people with sticks,”

“Hitting people with sticks isn’t so bad,” Kaz defends. “I’d hit people with sticks all the time if I was allowed to carry one everywhere. Like Mister Lovra and his walking stick,”

Jordie raises a brow.

“But I get what you mean…” Kaz mumbles. 

“Mhmm. Kaz, you’re smarter than all these kids put together, you know?”

“Yeah. What about you?”

“Well if you’re asking me questions, that means I must be smarter than you, so I guess I’m a genius then,”

Kaz smiles now, and he looks like the sweetest boy in Kerch. “And a genius wouldn’t stay with someone who they don’t like!”

“Exactly!” Jordie picks Kaz up. “And I like you best. In the whole wide world, I like you best,”

He carries his little brother home.

“Jordie?”

“Hm?”

“I love you too,”

Kaz cries at their father’s funeral. He’s nine, and Jordie is thirteen, and Jordie can count the number of times that Kaz has cried like this on one hand.

Jordie cries too, and they hold each other.

Jordie is smart, so once he and Kaz manage to get up and dust the grief off of them as well as they can, he makes a plan. They’ll go to Ketterdam, and he’ll get a job. 

He’ll succeed and make a ton of money. He’ll buy himself dozens of books, which Kaz can read if he wants to, but Kaz likes math more than reading now, and they’ll have butterscotch and chocolate every day.

Kaz nods to this plan when Jordie shares it.

On the train to Ketterdam, his little brother falls asleep with his head on Jordie’s lap, and Jordie realizes Kaz’s life is now dependent completely on him.

Jordie is still thirteen, and Kaz is still nine, when everything falls apart.

He doesn’t remember much from the boat, or the swimming. But he remembers his little brother pulling and pushing him to survive. 

He’s much weaker than Kaz. Jordie had the fever much longer than him, and had also eaten less in the days up until they were dumped into the Reaper’s Barge. He can’t figure out why his body is so weak though, even though Kaz has started running and crawling and coming back with a bloody nose and a bag of apples. 

His little brother is banged up almost every day, but Jordie knows that if Kaz is making it back to him looking like that, the other person must be worse off.

He ignores that thought, the same way he ignores the memory of Kaz’s tired, numb eyes when he was on the pier, and Jordie was still in the water, and he, for just a moment, thought Kaz was going to leave him to drown before he’d been pulled up alongside him.

Jordie takes a while to walk again, and he has a hard time breathing. Kaz says that the sickness must have left Jordie’s lungs weak, similarly to how Kaz’s voice, despite being a child, is now raspy and painful.

When Kaz takes them to their new closet room instead of an alley, he sees him around other people for the first time since the days before they decided to sleep under that forsaken bridge, and he notices Kaz doesn’t touch people.

Jordie is getting older, and Kaz is too. 

Kaz is making money.

Kaz is good at cards, and good at tricks. He brings Jordie food and clothes and books. 

Sometimes when Jordie is coughing his lungs out, Kaz will sit at his bedside and reach for his hand, and Jordie marvels at the fact that Kaz can stand to touch him at all. One of the cleaners that sometimes said hi to Jordie had complained that Kaz bit him for touching his shoulder.

Jordie loves his little brother more every day.

Jordie fears his little brother more every day.

When Kaz is twelve and Jordie is sixteen, Kaz comes home with a glint in his eyes that turns his blood to ice, and Jordie realizes that there had been a shadow of that feeling whenever Kaz looked at him ever since they’d left the cold harbor’s waves.

But now it’s at the highest possible intensity, and it isn’t turned at him. 

From that point forward, it’s never aimed at him again.

Jordie starts working at a small restaurant. He takes care of the desserts. He takes to baking in a way he’d never taken to the errand business of the Financial District, and he brings Kaz sweets.

Kaz never turns them down, until he tells Jordie to focus on eating things for his own health.

Jordie loves his little brother, and his little brother is drifting far, far away.

Kaz is in a gang. He moves out of their shared room. He sends Jordie more books. Jordie is terrified for him.

Kaz breaks his leg and refuses treatment. Jordie cries, because he hadn’t seen his brother in three weeks and in that time, Kaz got a cane. 

“Where is your brother nowadays?” His boss at the restaurant asks him. “The small one you would take chocolate too,”

“I don’t know, he has his own work,”

There’s silence and then another one of the cooks, a blond girl about Kaz’s age, enters the kitchen in a flurry of movement. “I just saw him!”

“Saw who?” they ask.

“Dirtyhands! He paused outside, and would you believe it, I think he was going to walk right in for just a second! But then he walked off, sadly,”

“Who is Dirtyhands?” Jordie asks. What kind of alias is that?

The girl and his boss stare at him. 

“You don’t know who Dirtyhands is? He’s been the talk of the Barrel for the past year! Around for longer, but he’s getting to be a big deal now,”

Jordie stares at her blankly.

“Surely you’ve seen him around? His name is Kaz Brekker, but people call him Dirtyhands. Has a cane, and he dresses like a Mercher, but he’s fine,” the girl fans herself, blind to the way that Jordie is now frozen over his bowl. “He’s in that one low-time gang, the Dregs? But ever since he joined up they’ve been doing a lot better,”

“Why do they call him Dirtyhands?” Jordie ventures. Good thing cooks like to gossip.

His boss answers that one. “It’s partially because he takes basically any job that comes to him. Dirties his hands from the crime and blood. Doesn’t seem to mind getting them dirty, or at least his gloves, anyway”

“I hear they’re stained red with blood,” the girl says, and Jordie doesn’t understand why she’s charmed. 

He’s dizzy and weak the rest of the day, and his boss takes pity on him. He’s sent home early, and he throws up, and the next day Kaz stops by with medicine. 

Jordie doesn’t ask him how he knows he was sick, and he looks at his brother, and when he leaves, Jordie cries again.

A few weeks later, Kaz sends him back to Lij on a train.

Jordie is nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two.

He works as a cook, and sometimes he looks after kids.

He flirts with a girl, and a boy, and anyone he likes, and he can’t keep anything stable.

He makes a friend though, Miss Jona’s son who was two years older than Jordie and who had called Kaz a ‘smart little devil’ with kindness, somehow, when Kaz had made hot chocolate without anyone telling him how and served them a mug each before going to read. His name is Derik, and he asks Jordie how little “Kazimir'” is doing.

Jordie is twenty-three. Most people in Lij don’t bring up Kaz to him anymore. Ten years have passed since the Barge, and four, almost five, since he came to Lij.

Kaz hasn’t sent him a letter.

Miss Lola, the innkeeper, tells him he’s alive because he sends back money to her and occasionally tells her to look after Jordie’s health. She’s never told him why Kaz sends money though.

One day, he sees the latest reply, left on top of her office desk. 

As he picks it up, he thinks about how strange it is that Kaz will be twenty soon. 

He reads it.

Dear Lola,

Here is the latest payment, I hope everything is in order.

Jordie will be twenty-four soon. Make sure his health doesn’t deteriorate. Send word if it does, and I’ll send along payment for his medical treatment.

Yes, I can send you an architect to help with expanding the inn. They’ll be along shortly.

It is unsigned. 

Kaz’s handwriting is still the worst he’s ever seen.

Things don’t hit him until that night as he leaves Derik’s shop and heads back to his room at Lola’s Inn. It’s an attic room. He’d written that to Kaz in the early days, hoping he’d get a reaction. 

He didn’t.

He never had.

His little brother is in Ketterdam, sending money, asking after his health. 

His little brother hasn’t talked to him in essentially five years, and honestly, when was the last they really had talked?

He sits down at his small table, and realizes he’s furious. 

He’s sent letters. He’s tried so hard to make Kaz look at him and see him alive, but Kaz only ever saw him as dead or sick and dying. 

Kaz is angry too, he knows.

Jordie knows why he’s angry, and Jordie loves his little brother more than anything else in his life, and his little brother is in so much trouble. 

So he writes a letter, and he scribbles all over the envelope because he doesn’t care as long as Kaz knows he’s not kidding. He puts in a chocolate so Kaz knows he’s not at “I hate you” levels, and mails it.

He buys a one-way ticket to Ketterdam, that son of a bitch of a city, because he’ll be back in Lij but he doesn’t know when, he takes his first vacation since he started working, he says bye to Derik and Lola, and he gets on the train.

Jordie hasn’t seen his brother in almost five years, and the first thing he does is hug him.

Kaz is tense, and he hears the others gasp. He doesn’t hug Jordie, he doesn’t pull away. 

The hug is brief, and Jordie pulls away.

They stare at each other.

“Mother fucker,” Jordie tells Kaz, and Kaz blinks and tilts his head in surprise and it’s so familiar that Jordie feels like they’re back at the farm and Jordie has told him that not everyone has a brother (Kaz had been offended by this at the time). 

Jordie continues on. “Five years? Five years, really? And you couldn’t reply to a single letter?”

Kaz doesn’t reply, he’s still staring at Jordie, confused. 

“What?” Jordie asks. 

“It’s just—” Kaz’s voice is a rasp and it takes Jordie by surprise, but he can still hear what Kaz would have sounded like without it, what Kaz used to sound like. “You look like… mother,”

Jordie stares at him. 

“I look like mother? You look like mother!” Jordie pokes Kaz in the chest. Jordie is barely an inch taller than him, but it’s enough. “How do you even remember what she looks like?”

“There was a huge portrait of her in the kitchen room,” Kaz replies dryly. “It would stare at me while I ate breakfast,”

Jordie pauses. “Oh, yeah. I have it now,”

Kaz hums in reply, and Jordie refocuses. “Wait, no, don’t distract me,”

Kaz is still tilting his head at him, but now he’s squinting.

“And none of that I’m going to steal Mrs. Vias’ chickens face either,” Jordie argues.

He hears a whisper of “Scheming face,” behind him, and silently agrees.

“I’m not—” Kaz shakes his head. “When did I do that? Actually, don’t tell me—”

“You were four and thought chickens were the best, I don’t know, Kaz—”

“You’re loud—”

“I’m loud? You’re loud!”

They stare at each other.

A voice behind them pipes up. “Do you guys… need a moment?”

It’s Jesper.

Kaz sighs. “You guys go with Wylan’s mother to the Komedie Brute. I’ll talk with… Jordie,”

Inej looks between Jordie and Kaz, and Jordie watches the way Kaz shakes his head, and she nods and gives him a small smile before leaving with the others.

They sit at a table, and Jordie remembers Kaz’s bad leg. He still has a cane, creepy crow head and all, and he still limps.

Jordie won’t cry today.

“Why didn’t you reply?”

“I was mad at you,”

“That’s not a good reason, Kaz,”

“Isn’t it?” 

Jordie sighs.

Jordie had been quiet after the Reaper’s Barge, and Kaz had been quiet his entire life. Their conversations were mostly short during the years before Jordie went back to Lij. 

At first, it had been the shock, and then the lack of strength that kept Jordie quiet. 

Then it was the fear and worry whenever Kaz came back looking more and more rabid every day.

Kaz didn’t talk to Jordie about the things he learned anymore, or what he’d tried that he didn’t like, or anything, really. He asked Jordie how he felt, physically. He told Jordie when he’d be gone, and sometimes he even told him when to expect him back. He told Jordie to be careful when he started moving around more. 

Jordie liked to talk, but he was weak for a long time, and scared for longer. He talked more at his job, because the cooks liked to and he liked joining in. He talked at Lij, too.

He became friends with Derik, and then he began to do more than talk. He’d laugh, and yell, and sometimes sing, and he learned how to make noise again, and he wished he could see how Kaz was doing.

This Kaz is neither quiet or loud.

“I lied,” Kaz says in the silence. “I wasn’t mad at you anymore,”

“So then what?”

“I didn’t read them,”

Jordie feels his chest tighten. “What?”

“I never read the letters,” Kaz says. “Lola told me you were alive, and healthy, and that’s what I needed and all I could hear. The letter about you coming is the only letter I’ve opened, because you wrote threats on the back of the envelope,”

Jordie breathes in and out. And he’s so, so fucking mad. 

He closes his eyes and thinks about the kid that kept him as comfortable as possible, who slept on the floor or didn’t sleep at all because Jordie was in bed, who had made him tea and bought him medicine when anyone else would have probably left him behind.

He opens his eyes and looks into Kaz’s, who looks at him straight on. 

“What’s this place?” he says.

“The Crow’s Nest,”

“It’s an inn?”

“Yes,”

“How much does a room cost?”

“Free, right now,”

Jordie doesn’t question it. “Great. I’ll go find where they put my stuff. Talk to me when you can give me a reason why you didn’t even read a single letter that I sent you,”

It’s been a few hours, and there’s a knock at his door. Jordie knows it isn’t Kaz, and doesn’t open it.

“Mister Rietveld?” a young lady’s voice calls out. Inej, he thinks. She seems the calm, reasonable sort.

“I’ll pick your lock if you don’t open the door,” she continues after a moment.

Never mind, then.

He opens it and she walks in, sitting at the small table in the corner. Jordie awkwardly closes the door behind her and sits on the bed. 

Neither of them speaks but the silence makes him uncomfortable, like it’s pulling at him, and eventually he breaks. 

“You’re a friend of Kaz’s?” he asks.

Inej thinks it over. “I suppose. I used to be his spy, and I still am when he needs me. I’m a lieutenant in his gang, although it’s more honorary than not,” she shrugs.

Jordie stares at her. “You’re probably more,”

“How would you know?” 

Jordie shrugs. “I don’t know how you would be, but in that room there were five of you. Five people Kaz was with when he decided to see me again. Kaz doesn’t like people. Never has. But you’re there, so you must be more than a job description. And you’re here now,”

She smiles, and Jordie realizes there’s no way she isn’t more than a friend to Kaz. 

“We’re his crows,” Inej says. “Do you know what Kaz is?”

“Gang member. They call him Dirtyhands, don’t they?”

“He’s a Barrel Boss,”

Jordie was about to reach into his pocket to eat a butterscotch, but that throws him. “What?”

“He’s the boss of a gang. In charge. That’s why I’m one of his lieutenants, not one besides him,” Inej says. “Kaz is the leader of the Dregs. He owns the Crow Club, a gambling den. He owns the Crow Bar, a tavern, and he owns this place, an inn. He has most of the city in his pocket,” Inej takes out a knife and fiddles with it. “Kaz is the scariest thing in Ketterdam,”

Jordie thinks about the day he’d learned Kaz was in a gang, which was months after it had actually happened.

And now he’s the boss.

“How did he become a boss? He’s awful with people. He can read them just fine but he’s always felt bothered with larger groups. I’ve seen him be comfortable with strangers maybe once…” Jordie drifted off. He didn’t want to think about the one time Kaz had trusted a stranger. It had been the worst mistake of their lives.

“Let’s make a deal,” Inej says. “I’ll tell you who my Kaz is, and you tell me who your Kaz is. Kaz has secrets, and I won’t share those, but I’ll share every bit of Barrel lore with you that’s true,”

“Why do you want to know my Kaz?” Jordie asks. “Seems you know what matters, don’t you?”

“Very rarely,” Inej says slowly. “Kaz will smile without anything else behind it but happiness, and he looks like a saint. He looks like a boy in love with life. He smiles more now, but it’s still a shock. One time it happened because Wylan, Jesper, and I stole a tank,”

“ What,”

“Anyway, I’d like to hear where that boy’s smiling face comes from, and I think you’re the only person in the world who can tell me,”

“Kaz has secrets, does he now? How isn’t this a secret too? He changed his bloody last name,”

She stares at him. “I’ve been learning his secrets for years, and I keep them. We’ll trade stories, but you can’t flinch away. I’ll begin: Kaz Brekker is a thief, and there’s nothing he can’t steal,”

They talk for hours. 

Jordie cries, and this girl, Inej, cries too. Neither of them mention it. He told himself before he wouldn’t cry but he should have known better.

It’s evening now, between the hours he spent alone in his room and the ones he spent speaking with Inej, and he’s hungry.

They’ve exhausted their words, and Jordie feels like he used to, when just a few sentences would get him out of breath. 

He’s learned a lot. 

“You love him,” Inej tells him.

“So do you,” he replies, and she pinks. Jordie laughs. “I’m glad someone other than me loves him,”

“Jesper loves him as well. Wylan probably does too,” Inej says. “Nina and Matthias and Kaz… Well, I told you about them already. They’re difficult, but they get each other too. Now it’s time for you to eat,”

“Please,”

Jordie isn’t prepared for Jesper to be obsessed with him.

Well, not obsessed, but the boy can’t stop looking at him, and goes through a flurry of emotions any time Jordie does… anything. 

“What?” he asks. It’s just him, and Jesper, and Inej. From what Inej told him, Jesper and her and Kaz’s favorites. 

“You two look a lot alike,” Jesper tries to explain. “Your faces are identical when you raise your eyebrows—yes, just like that!—but then you also have some expressions and it’s like seeing Kaz’s face do things it’s never done before. I can’t get over it,”

Jordie smiles at Jesper’s enthusiasm and Jesper reacts again. “See! This is what I mean! Kaz doesn’t smile at me like that!”

“He does when you aren’t looking,” Inej says from where she’s sitting on the counter and buttering toast. 

“What?”

Inej rolls her eyes. 

Jesper pointed his spoon at her. “We’re talking about this later. Anyway, another thing is that I didn’t know you existed until Kaz was… uh…. Beating me up over it,”

Jordie puts down his tea. “Uh…”

“Long story short, Jesper has—”

“Had,”

“An arrogance streak—”

“Wait, no, yeah, that one is present tense,”

“And a money problem,”

“That one is past tense,”

“And he was always comfortable with Kaz,” Inej says. “And Kaz was hard on Jesper, harder than he needed to be, and Jesper just stayed by his side regardless,”

“I made bad decisions,” Jesper says. “Kaz had his reasons to be mad at me. He can’t depend on someone who gambles away all their money or… says information he shouldn’t. I’d messed up, and I guess Kaz trusted me enough to be very, very angry about it. And Kaz holds grudges. So then, tensions are running high since the entire, and I mean entire, city is trying to kill us, and Kaz is unbearable. I get mad, he gets mad, we fight—side note, don’t fight with Kaz. The only reason you’ll stay alive is because he’s angry but not murderous. If he’s murderous, well, it can be a problem—and he calls me Jordie,”

Jordie stares at Jesper and Jesper stares back.

Jordie shakes his head. “I don’t get it,”

Jesper snorts. “It’s been almost three years since then. I’ve gotten better, you know. And Kaz too. Between then and now, I was able to piece together that Jordie—you—was Kaz’s brother, but I thought you were dead because he never brought you up. Inej knew the most, because that’s just how she and Kaz are, and with his eventual permission, she explained it to me,”

Jesper’s eyes aren’t light with humor or interest anymore, and the look he levels at Jordie makes him uncomfortable. His gray eyes are too bright. 

“Yesterday, I was pissed when Kaz said he hadn’t read your letters. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it until I sat down and thought it through. But I know Kaz. And I know Dirtyhands. I know myself. I know exactly why Kaz couldn’t trust me. I was fooled by money, drawn in even by bad chances. I was reckless, jumped into things too quickly. I thought I was invincible, but I was going to die more often than not, and had gotten into trouble more times than I can count, and Kaz dragged me out of it every single time. Saved me when he shouldn’t have bothered, because I was useful enough. You’re right to be mad at Kaz. He didn’t need to ignore your letters, and he shouldn’t have. But if he could look at me and see you, and it was something to fight me over, and if what I understand about you and him and Pekka Rollins… I know exactly why Dirtyhands would have looked at a letter from you and tossed it aside,”

Jordie can hear his own heartbeat, and it hurts to breathe. 

I was fooled by money, drawn in even by bad chances. I was reckless. I thought I was invincible.

Kaz dragged me out of it.

Look at me and see you.

Dirtyhands would have looked at a letter from you and tossed it aside.

“You’re right,” is all Jordie says.

He’d thought he understood Kaz’s anger. He thought it was that Kaz had to take care of him and shield him even though Jordie was older. 

But he should have known better.

Jordie told Kaz to trust him and then ruined their lives.

Maybe if Kaz was older, Jordie could argue with him. Jordie had only been thirteen, after all, and they were farm boys. He was naive, but couldn’t that be forgiven?

But not only had Kaz been younger than him, Kaz hadn’t grown up with the same love Jordie had. Jordie had more years of his father being attentive and doting, more years of his mother pressing kisses to his hair. He had trusted people in Lij, and Kaz had only ever had Jordie. 

Jordie, who had been desperate and taken up the first offer for help without thinking twice.

Jordie, who had been sicker than Kaz and left a nine year old to guard him. 

Jordie, who Kaz had reached for through dead bodies that had scarred Kaz’s mind, but not his.

Jordie, who was extra weight as much smaller Kaz swam them to shore, Jordie who Kaz pulled up even though he’d only hindered Kaz’s chances of survival.

Kaz had been nine. His father had just died, and they were in a new city. Their new 'friends', who had disappeared as fast as they came and who Kaz had actually liked, had only shaken him more. 

Of course Kaz, who then learned to not make mistakes, to not trust anyone, to not be foolish with his money, who, according to Inej, never broke a promise or a deal, would look at the brother that made every mistake, and not trust him.

To add insult to injury, Kaz at thirteen had known so much more than Jordie had. If the roles had been reversed, they probably would have become rich merchers. 

He’s been thinking, quiet and without really hearing what’s going on around him, when Jesper lays a finger on his shoulder and lightly shakes him.

Jordie looks up at the boy who somehow ended up taking part of the blame for Jordie’s mistakes. 

“Hey. Look at me,” Jesper says. “In the end, I’m on Kaz’s side, and I probably always will be. But Kaz can’t go on how he has when it comes to you. He’s gotten rid of Pekka Rollins now, and he’s better with… emotions I guess. And he forgave me for what I had done. He can forgive you,”

“I think he’d rather forget,” Jordie mutters.

“He seems to have tried that,” Inej admits. “Not opening the letters, never talking about you, things like that. But you seem to be stubborn too, and you sprinted back into his life and now he doesn’t have much of a choice,”

“Hmm,” Jordie doesn’t know if they’re right. Would he forgive himself? “I wonder if he had been better off if I’d just died from the plague,”

Jesper and Inej frown at each other and shrug.

“Not sure if it would have made a difference,” Jesper says. “Everything with Pekka would have still happened. If it’s about whether you live or die, I’m pretty sure most of Kaz’s issues aren’t really centered around that,”

“I guess that’s a good thing?”

“I think it just means he’d be Dirtyhands regardless,”

Jordie nods. Probably. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask since Inej brought this up earlier while she and I were talking, but I’d get distracted thinking about what I’d share about Kaz next—why do you guys keep talking about Pekka? I understand Kaz has a… grudge against him? That he ran him out of the city? But I never met the man,”

Inej puts her head in her hands. “Kaz didn’t tell you,”

“Is that really a surprise?”

“I’m just annoyed that I didn’t realize he hadn’t. I don’t even know the full story to this day. From what I understand, a man pulled a con on you and Kaz when you first came to Ketterdam, and that’s how you ended up homeless and without any money or a scrap of support. The man that pulled the con was Pekka Rollins under another name. Kaz learned about this and swore to destroy him,”

“That son of a bitch Hertzoon was Pekka Rollins?” Jordie asks, mouth agape.

“Uh, yeah,”

“When did Kaz learn about this?”

“The time table is a bit messy,” Inej admits. “But according to him he joined the Dregs when he was twelve because he realized he’d need a gang to tear Pekka down,”

And now Jordie knows. He remembers the day Kaz’s eyes stopped seeing him and when they focused like a shark on a different bloody corpse.

“Yeah,” Jordie slouches in his chair. “Yeah. He never told me why things changed, but I think I know exactly what day it was he must have learned that…. Fuck, Kaz,”

It’s been a few days, and he’s talked with everyone.

Matthias seems to actually believe that Kaz is a demon, but seems to have a lot of respect for him too.

“He didn’t break his deal with me so much as he knew I would break it with him,” Matthias tells him. They’re eating melon alone in the kitchen at six in the morning and Jordie isn’t sure why yet. “I thought he didn’t know two things about love, but he knew Nina was going to be the most important factor. I still don’t know how he knew, but he was right,”

Jordie has no fucking clue what he’s talking about but instead of staring at him with confusion or awe like the others, the bigger man just keeps feeding Jordie fruit, and Jordie can get behind that.

Wylan doesn’t know what to do with Jordie, so he talks him through what Kaz has taught him, which is almost entirely pick pocketing and lock picking. Wylan isn’t allowed to practice at the Crow’s Nest, apparently Kaz doesn’t want him scratching up the locks, but Jordie is interested anyway.

“How do you deal with him?” Jordie asks.

“Kaz? I used to think he was going to kill me every time I disagreed with him,” Wylan reminisces. “Actually he was probably seconds away from throwing me overboard this one time… But the thing about Kaz is that he doesn’t really care what your problem is as long as you can do something. That’s a problem for some people, because it sounds like he doesn’t care enough to help, but that’s not it. Kaz has a limp, and he needs a cane, and he’s still the scariest brawler I’ve ever seen. Nina’s powers… aren’t normal anymore, they’re kind of the opposite, and it’s true that Kaz does need to hire a healer now, but he still trusts her in a fight. Jesper has so many problems, and I say that with love, but he’s always Kaz’s second. I… can’t read. Or write. Neither one. Physical language doesn’t make sense to me. But Kaz doesn’t give a damn, and I think that’s why I still back him up. He’d never throw someone away because they can’t do a job, no matter how often he threatens it,”

Jordie has met a lot of people who can’t read, so that doesn’t faze him. What does move him instead is the amount of pride Jordie has in Kaz, who looked at his ragtag crew and made legends out of curses. 

Nina has calmed down about him and Kaz’s faces. She’s talkative and friendly, and when Jordie asks about Kaz, she grins.

“When I met Inej, she told me that Kaz was utterly without conscience, and that he was a liar and a cheat. But he kept any deal struck with him. She was right. It used to piss me off, actually. I didn’t like Kaz for a long time, you know. He gave me no reason too, and he’s scary practical, which always bothered me. But when I realized at the end of it all that he’d done everything and more than he’d promised and that if I asked him for help, he would actually say yes, he started growing on me,”

“That,” she adds. “And the fact that for a short time, I could feel how much he loved Inej,”

“What?” Jordie asks, confused. 

“Long story short, but I’m a Grisha, you know that already. I was really, really amplified for a bit, and it was amazing and awful, and I could hear the way his breath and heart reacted when he saw her,” Nina smiled, although it's neither happy nor sad. “At the time, I was too gone and too tired to care, and then after that, I was worse, and then better, but we were taking on an entire city and I was going through a whole identity crisis, not important—”

“It sounds important?”

“Nope! But when I was finally gone for a while with Matthias in Ravka, I kind of realized what it all meant. I got news from Inej about everything he’d done for her, and sometimes he offered help to me without me even having to barter more than a few jewels or tip-offs, and eventually realized Kaz was just another person. An infuriating one, but he kept me alive and even if my current life is something I planned with Matthias, if Kaz hadn’t taken me away from Pekka Rollins my first night alone in Kerch, I probably wouldn’t even be alive,”

His little brother is the craziest person alive, Jordie thinks. He’s been piecing together the story of Kaz’s years since the Reaper’s Barge, and Jordie wondered just what Kaz is made of. He isn’t like Jordie, or their parents. 

He wonders what a Kaz growing up in Lij for his entire life would be like, and he knows Kaz would have never stayed in Lij. 

Somehow he knows he would have become some version of Dirtyhands regardless. 

Kaz is nineteen and Jordie is twenty-three. 

Ten years have passed.

“What do you want, Jordie?”

“...Look at me a moment, won’t you?”

Kaz does. His hair, which is a bit weird, Jordie won’t lie, but not exactly bad, is messy and falling over his eyes. It’s midnight and Kaz is working. 

There are two beds in Kaz’s room, one for him and one occupied by a sleeping Wraith, as he's come to know her.

Jordie and Kaz haven't ignored each other, or really interacted either. Jordie had told Kaz to come and talk to him, and he’s hoping Kaz will someday be the one to reach out to him, but even if Jordie is still sad about the letters, he isn’t angry anymore. He just misses his brother.

They look at each other, and Jordie admits they both look a lot alike, and are both the spitting image of their mother, just with their father’s height and jaw. 

“What?” Kaz asks again.

Jordie smiles. “Did you know I love my little brother?”

The words sink in, and Kaz tilts his head like he always has when Jordie told him anything that took him by mild surprise. Not even the cousin “Scheming Face” is that exact face of surprise that Jordie knows. He did have a different one for Inej, he’d noted, but this one is still Jordie’s.

“Shut up,” Kaz says gruffly and turns away.

Jordie keeps smiling. “It seems he really is smarter than all the people in Lij put together for sure,”

“Jordie…”

“Even if he hits people with a stick a lot—”

“It’s a cane—”

“And even if he isn’t like others. Even with a limp. Even with gloves. I think I could forgive anything he’s done,”

Kaz doesn’t reply. 

“I don’t think I’d blame him if he never forgives me. I thought I got it, but I didn’t, for the longest time. And you know what? My little brother is my favorite person in the whole wide world. He’s different than I am. He’s more broken and he’s stronger, and he’s getting stronger every day. I don’t know what he’s made of to survive everything he has, but I still love him,”

Kaz is frozen in his seat, and he won’t look at Jordie.

“He’s probably never going to come back to Lij, and that’s alright. I’ll come to him. He has a lot on his plate. I’ll wait to hear from him here in Ketterdam for a while longer, because I know I have to be patient when it comes to my little brother and other people. Still, maybe I’ll get a letter from him, if he can’t speak to me directly. Anything works,”

He waits a bit longer before he stands up straight from where he was leaning against Kaz’s door frame. “Get some rest, alright? I meant everything I said, and I know it’s hard to trust me after everything, but I’ll try until I get it right, on your terms,”

He moves into the hall, about to close the door, when Kaz calls out. 

“G’night, Jordie,”

Kaz’s face peeks over the side of their shared bunk bed. Somehow, Kaz beat Jordie at tic-tac-toe ten times in a row for the right to the top bunk. He’s only two, but he’s clever. And not just because he's already talking.

“G’night, Jordie!”

“You’re not sleepy at all, are you?”

“No. I’m going to count doves until I am like you said to,”

“Alright. G’night, Kaz,”

He grins. “Count crows until you can fall asleep. G’night, Kaz,”

The next morning there’s a letter under Jordie’s door. 

Kaz’s handwriting is the worst.

Dear Jordie,

I’m still mad at you.

You should be more mad at me.

Did you know people call me the Bastard of the Barrel? Because I sprouted up from nowhere made to survive it, apparently. 

You’re right, that we’re different.

That’s why my Crows are here. They’re built more like me than anyone I’ve met.

But I don’t give you enough credit (the others say this is a problem I have with people. The others are idiots) (except Inej).

You’re not me, but you aren’t like the people in Lij either. They wouldn’t have sent letters to me like you have and kept trying. You took longer to heal in the beginning, but you did heal, didn’t you? I haven’t gotten there yet.

I think I forgave you the day I forgave Jesper. You should probably thank him for that. And I tried to forget you when I got rid of Pekka Rollins (Jakob Hertzoon son of a bitch, I never did explain that, did I). 

But since I didn’t give you credit, I thought things were irreparable, and I told myself that was fine. But I wasn’t angry at you anymore. I didn’t hate you. But how could Dirtyhands deserve a brother that brought him chocolate even though he’d killed someone hours before? How could Dirtyhands deserve a brother that kept sending him letters without ever getting a reply?

I don’t know what else to tell you, although Inej tells me you’ve learned a lot the past few days. I’m probably going to take issue with something the others said, but if you know who Dirtyhands is and everything you said tonight is true, then I’ll have you know that I’ll be reading every letter.

     -   Kaz Brekker

P.S.  -  Kaz Rietveld if you’re really hung up about it.

P.P.S. I’m about 2/3s of the way through. Saints’ sake, just ask Derik out

Five years and Jordie had gotten a reply back.

Ten years and Jordie finally had a chance to get his brother back too.

Kaz wakes up at the Crow’s Nest. Inej is shifting in the other bed of their shared room, and for a moment he worries about the late morning sun filtering through, that he’s wasting the hours he was with her, before he remembers she’s staying almost the entire Spring, and he relaxes.

He can hear the other Crows laughing downstairs and chuckles as Inej grumbles and pulls her covers over her head. 

He takes a few moments to think about the night before. He went to sleep as the horizon had started to lighten and Inej had told him to get into his own bed because he had forever to fix things with Jordie.

Jordie, who is not sneaky and has just pushed a small envelope under his door.

Kaz gets up and grabs it after Jordie’s footsteps fade. 

Dear Kaz,

You’re still the best little brother. Please stay in bed until past noon and sleep. 

I know who Dirtyhands is and who Kaz Brekker is and they’re both my little brother, so you’re going to have to deal with me forever. 

You do not get to tell me to ask people out, Mister Bought A Warship. Inej told me all about that one. That being said, do you know where I can buy a warship?

Love, Jordie Rietveld. But don’t worry, Kaz Brekker sounds pretty cool.

Kaz wakes up again a few hours later, hears his brother’s laughter, and is glad to be alive.