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Wylan wakes up alone.
He knows, immediately, that something is wrong. The only disturbance of the covers has been made by himself; the other side of the bed is untouched, except for where his hand had landed on Jesper's pillow during the night. The rest is left unruffled and empty.
He hadn’t come back.
The night before, Kaz sent Jesper on a job that hadn’t required a demo man. Wylan hadn’t been surprised about it, though he hadn’t liked it either. He hasn’t woken up alone in ages, and Jesper’s absence in their bed now is a strange, unknown thing. And maybe it shouldn't scare him, not as much as it does, but—
Well, but it does.
He knows Jesper is perfectly capable of handling himself—more than. Jesper is a master of his skill, and certainly strong enough to hold his own—a fact that usually makes Wylan extremely proud and somewhat flustered, because though Jesper is skinny as a rail, he’s made of lean and toned muscles. Firm and sturdy—but there is something about being away from the action that still leaves him feeling anxious and untethered each time. Worried about how quick the drop is between competent and overconfident. How long the fall.
Wylan told him he’d wait up, and Jesper told him he didn’t need to. Wylan had planned to wait up anyway.
Apparently, it hadn’t worked. Wylan does not remember falling asleep, and yet it’s undeniably morning now. Still early enough that the sun isn’t quite peeking through the curtains, but he can tell it will soon. He’s tired from staying up too late and his eyes feel fuzzy and dry, disoriented from the surprise of however much time has slipped away from him.
He tries not to get worked up. He gets worked up anyway. No matter how much he tries to rationalise it, there is a deep pit growing in his stomach, convincing him that something is very, very wrong. He gets out of bed and leaves their room. He doesn’t bother with boots, just creeps down the hall in his socks. It’s still dark in the Slat, and most of its occupants will be sleeping for a while yet—but, as he quickly discovers, not all.
It doesn’t take long to hear voices. They filter out from Kaz’s office, freezing Wylan in place.
“You still might need a medik,” he hears—Nina’s voice. She sounds tired, and annoyed. “How many times do I have to tell you two I wasn’t trained for proper healing?”
“You're doing fine”—Jesper. Jesper’s voice. He sounds… dim is the only way Wylan can think to describe it. Tinny. Like the rich, mellow timbre of his words have been syphoned off into something thinner. He coughs wetly—“Gold stars all around, Neens, really.”
“I’m not above knocking you out, you know,” Nina says, but even without being in the room, he can tell there’s no real threat in it. It’s soft, fond, and concerned.
Wylan’s heart feels like it’s detached from his chest. Like it’s somewhere else entirely, and wherever that is, someone is squeezing it very tightly. He walks closer, almost hovering outside the threshold, places a hand on the knob.
It’s been a very long time since Wylan has felt out of place with the Crows, but as he opens the office door, he cannot help but feel—not unwelcome, but uninvited, and left out of the loop.
Unnecessary, his mind supplies, and he tries very, very hard not to give it a chance to amend, worthless.
He balls up the cuffs of his shirt—it’s one of Jesper’s, though Wylan can’t remember when he’d taken it up as his own. Long enough that it doesn’t smell like Jesper anymore, just Wylan, which is a tragedy—and casts a look around the room, feeling awkward and out of place and comparatively underdressed in only his sleep clothes and socks.
Kaz looks as he always does, except worse, his hair falling uncharacteristically messy over his face. He turns sharply from where he’d been facing the window when Wylan enters, eyes even darker than usual.
Nina looks worried, a deep, weighty frown on her face as her hands press against Jesper’s abdomen.
And Jesper looks—
“What happened?” Wylan balks.
Everyone is staring at him now, and Wylan hates it, hates this, but it all pales in comparison to the awful feeling tearing itself through his chest at the sight of Jesper, Jesper’s face—
“Jes—” Wylan’s voice breaks.
“I’m fine,” Jesper assures quickly. Nina scoffs. She takes her hands away from Jesper’s stomach to cross them over her chest. “I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine!”
“You’ll be fine when I say you’ll be fine,” Nina mutters.
Jesper tries to smile at Wylan, tries to give him a surreptitious thumbs up with the hand farthest from Nina, tries to wink of all things. It doesn’t make Wylan feel any better. It also looks like it hurts, because both Jesper’s eyes are puffy and red, and the side of his face sports an angry mark that’s still bleeding sluggishly from his eyebrow. There’s bruising blooming from below his collar all the way up to his hairline, dark and tender looking. His jaw looks sort of swollen too, and he grimaces at his own smile, so it must hurt.
Looking at it makes Wylan want to cry, so instead he looks at Kaz.
“What happened?” he asks again, very quietly.
“Debt collectors. And an idiot.”
“Kaz!” Jesper protests. Kaz shoots him a glare that pierces slightly duller than usual, which makes Wylan worry even more. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Jesper tries again.
Wylan doesn’t respond. He keeps looking at Kaz.
Kaz sighs. He sweeps his hair back in its usual style and pushes up from the window. “He’ll be fine. It’s not good, but nothing with debt collectors ever is. I’m working on it.”
Wylan nods. It strikes him that Kaz is being almost gentle. He looks worn thin and stiff, standing like his leg is hurting him more than usual. He straightens slightly further, as if clocking Wylan’s notice of it, his shadows casting longer tracks behind his back.
It isn’t really the focus of Wylan’s thoughts anyway. Kaz’s words truly start to sink in, and a cold, awful feeling goes through him, the pit in his stomach deepening.
“Debt collectors? But—I thought the job was near Sweet Reef—?”
Wylan phrases it like a question, but it isn’t. Debt collectors meant the parlours, the dens, the tables; they wouldn’t bother trailing Jesper all the way to or from Sweet Reef.
There is a tense, uncomfortable silence in which no one speaks, and Wylan wants nothing more than to go to Jesper and make everything stop feeling like the end of the world—it isn’t. He’s being—dramatic, and overanxious, probably. All he knows is that everything feels wrong, and he isn’t sure what he’s meant to do.
Wylan looks at Jesper again, at his bruised and bloody face and his tarnished shirt. He’s still avoiding looking back, glancing everywhere in the room but Wylan’s direction. Jesper never avoids Wylan, it’s not the way things are. He always seeks Wylan out, with his eyes or his hands, his smiles. He isn’t meant to be so muted and dim, so defeated with his head so heavy-hung on his shoulders. It puts the whole scene into the perspective of a bad dream, fuzzy at the edges with the dregs of the sleep he’d been in before he entered. Still, he keeps his eyes steady and his stance firm.
“Can we have a minute?” Jesper asks of the others, finally, still not looking at Wylan.
“This is my office,” comes Kaz’s reply.
“Are you asking me to get up and go in the hallway?”
“Not if he knows what’s good for him,” Nina says darkly.
Kaz looks unimpressed with all of them. Jesper doesn’t waver. He looks pleadingly at Kaz as they have a silent conversation that Wylan isn’t privy to, and then Kaz relents.
“You have the room,” he grumbles, cane smacking the floor as he moves to go.
Nina points a threatening finger at Jesper and says, without much heat, “If anything happens to those ribs while I’m gone, I’m letting them heal wrong.”
Jesper solutes, and it looks like that hurts him too.
“What’s wrong with your ribs?” Wylan asks, once they’re alone. He moves closer, wondering what’s least likely to hurt if he reaches to touch. He lets their knees bump together lightly.
Jesper laughs and then winces, like the laugh costs him something. “They’re not supposed to be broken, mostly.”
“Jes.”
“I know! I know. I wasn’t expecting them, and they caught me walking back. I’m usually better with these things.”
He looks embarrassed. He looks ashamed. He still won’t really look at Wylan at all. Wylan refuses to cry. He really, really feels like he might, and he feels stupid and childish for it. He leans back against Kaz’s desk and bites his lip.
He doesn’t know what to do. They’ve had… incidents, relapses, before, but none so bad as this, none where Jesper was hurt so badly he couldn’t walk it off with a chipper wink and a smile afterwards. They’ve talked about the gambling, some, not overly in detail, but Wylan thinks he has the shape of most of it.
He just doesn’t know what to do. He wants to make it better but he doesn’t know how. He wants Jesper to look at him, to trust him with this, to be honest—and maybe that’s hypocritical, considering how much Wylan still hasn’t told him, but it’s the way he feels, even so. Wylan doesn’t want to lie to Jesper. He’s made a point of being honest with him, as often as he can be, while also trying to conceal the worst marks of his past, the hold they have on him still. He wants Jesper to trust him, to let him carry some of this with him, if only so the heavy slump of his shoulders lifts just a bit. He wants Jesper to talk to him—Jesper always talks to him—though, he admits, rarely about this.
He wants to hug Jesper but isn't sure if he should, so he takes his hand instead. Jesper’s eyes are too big, too fast. They skitter over him and then bounce away just as quickly. He bounces his legs in the chair, knocking them against Wylan’s by proximity. His hand is limp and cold to the touch, knuckles blistering and red, but he doesn’t pull away.
“What did they want?” Wylan tries, tone hopefully neutral.
“Nothing, just to scare me about some debts I’ve already paid off. I swear.”
“Okay,” Wylan says slowly.
“Wylan—”
“I believe you,” Wylan clarifies, and Jesper sags in place like he’d needed to hear it. “I—I’m just…” he struggles. He’s never seen it get this bad. He’d known, distantly, that it has been before, but it’s different to be confronted by it. To see its marks on Jesper’s skin.
When he doesn’t continue, Jesper links their fingers and plays with them idly. Wylan wants to be closer, so he perches on the edge of Kaz’s desk.
“What happened?” Wylan asks a third time, softly.
“Nothing. I’m fine. I made a bad call, that’s it.”
“This is fine?” Wylan questions, voice betraying how frazzled he feels. He doesn’t want to be the only one upset about this; he thinks, realistically, that he isn’t, but he doesn’t want to be the only one unable to tamp it down into something manageable. Jesper is hurt, he’s hurting. Wylan can’t find it in himself to pretend it means less to him than it does.
Jesper’s nonchalance, his stubborn disinterest in the topic, rankours something deep. It doesn’t feel fair. It isn’t right. It makes Wylan feel half-mad and desperate to be understood.
Jesper takes his hand back and turns his face sharply away, hissing in pain when the movement proves unwise. The sound hurts Wylan too, somewhere inside, and he reaches out for Jesper again only to be stopped by a somewhat withering look that quite clearly tells him he doesn’t want to be touched.
Wylan pinches his mouth in a thin, tense line and tries not to show just how deeply hurt by it he is. He pushes off the desk to stand. “What aren’t you saying?”
“Nothing.” Jesper clenches his jaw, fingers beating a rapid tattoo against the chair arm.
Wylan hitches his shoulders and breathes sharply. He crosses his arms to keep from fidgeting with his sleeves. “Nothing?”
“I played a few games. Nothing bad happened.”
“This isn’t bad?”
“Nothing bad happened in the games. The debt collectors were bad. That’s different,” Jesper defends, cagey and restless and annoyed in a way that Wylan isn’t expecting. “They were on about the lien on the farm—which I already paid—but—look”—he breathes out a reedy, shaky breath—“they were just trying to scare me. It’s nothing. Kaz is handling it.”
“But the job with Kaz—”
“Went well,” Jesper says, but there’s no pride in it. “You wouldn’t get it, okay. I played a few games. I got caught in a bad way. It happens. It’s fine. It’s over. I’m fine.”
“Stop saying you’re fine!” Wylan nearly shouts. It gets Jesper to look at him, at least, though Wylan feels little triumph for it.
Stop overreacting. Jesper doesn’t say it, but the way he looks at Wylan gives him enough cause to suspect he’s thinking it.
Stop overreacting, Wylan. Don’t be so overemotional, Wylan. It’s tedious, and does not gain you any respect. His father had hated when Wylan got upset—had hated when he cried, or fought back, or fed the strength of any of his emotions at all, really.
Melodrama isn’t befitting of a boy of your station, Wylan. Histrionics are for waifs and wailing babes. Are you either of those, Wylan? He’d always seemed to think Wylan’s tears were proof of his incompetence, or else some form of attempted manipulation. Like Wylan was crying on purpose, hoping for sympathy or some other foul thing his father deemed beneath him to provide. Stop crying, Wylan. Ghezen’s works, crocodile tears won’t get you anywhere.
Wylan clenches his hands into tight fists, nails digging painfully into his skin. He closes his eyes for a long moment, sniffs, and when he opens them again he meets Jesper’s head on. “Stop saying you’re fine, please. Jes, please. Play games, lose money, get hurt—whatever, fine, but don’t—don’t lie. Don’t lie to me.”
“You want the truth?” Jesper asks, dark and foreboding, and Wylan doesn’t speak. Jesper looks like he wants to pace but he doesn’t want to deal with the pain that will come from standing up. He moves to rub his hand over his face and then stops, clenching his fist. “I got cocky, okay? I was stupid. I was stupid, and reckless, and I went too close to the clubs, and I didn’t lose—or, not much, but I got caught anyway. That’s what happened. That’s all there is to it. And it’ll probably happen again, just so you know, because, maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m not a very good person, Wylan, and I’m not a very good boyfriend either.”
“I don’t understand,” Wylan says weakly, though he thinks maybe he does. He looks down, at his socked feet, cold against the bitter chill of morning and the hardwood. He sounds pathetic. He sounds like a child. He wills his voice not to crack. “If the debts were paid then—”
He’s cut off by a bitter laugh that cuts like gravel on raw and bloody knees.
“That’s the Barrel, kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” Wylan says, shocked. It comes out louder than he’d expected. Angry when he didn’t know he was angry in the first place. Wounded. He might be crying, a little. Maybe a lot. Jesper hasn’t yelled, not yet, but he’s being mean, and there’s nothing he thinks could have prepared him for it. The truth of just how much Wylan has come to trust him not to be, how naively he’s let his guard down in the months they’ve been together, feels earth-shatteringly loud in the quiet of the room. “I’m not a kid.”
Jesper looks startled. “I know,” he says. “Sorry.”
“I’m not stupid,” Wylan snaps. He certainly feels stupid, though he can’t help but defend himself. He bites his lip, tasting salt.
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t—Wylan, I didn’t mean that—hey,” Jesper pleads. “Hey, Wy, I’m sorry.”
“Mm,” is all the response Wylan gives. He still feels angry, and stupid, and numb, all over. He feels like a joke. A supremely unfunny joke that neither of them are laughing at, but a joke nonetheless.
“Look, I’m just trying to warn you. This is like, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my fuck ups.” Jesper sighs. He rakes a hand through his matted curls. “I’m a gambler, a player, yeah? Loose lips and looser pockets, that’s me. I’m a mush, Wylan. You already knew that. Everyone knows that. What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know,” Wylan says wretchedly. He wipes feebly at his eyes and wishes Jesper had come home last night, and that they were in bed waking up right now. That Jesper was kissing him into the mattress and calling him darling or love, teasing him like always and making them late to whatever meeting or tasks Kaz has them on for the day.
He doesn’t know how they got here. He doesn’t want to fight. He doesn’t like the distance between them—any of it. He doesn’t want to feel like this.
But this is all he has.
He isn’t very interested in giving up on any of it, not if he can help it.
“I don’t need a warning off,” Wylan tells him. He kneels down to reach Jesper’s eye level. “I need you to talk to me.”
Jesper is crying, not as much as Wylan, but he is. Wylan thinks he looks beautiful even now, covered in reds and yellows and blues like paint strokes as the pale light of dawn starts to filter in from the street outside Kaz’s office.
“You deserve better,” Jesper says, so quietly. A broken whisper over his cracked lips. He’s avoiding looking at him again, and it’s all just—wrong, unacceptable. “You deserve a better boyfriend.”
“I don’t know what I deserve,” Wylan says, sharp, desperate. And it’s so much more honest than it needs to be, than he means it to be. So much so that it cracks Wylan down the middle to dig out of himself, a little bit. He thinks Jesper can see it, even like this.
“Wylan,” Jesper’s eyes soften. Jesper softens. He’s staring now, wide eyed and wet.
Wylan shakes his head.
“I don’t know what I deserve, Jes. But I want you.” Wylan has to be gentle when he touches his cheek. Still, it looks like it hurts. He ghosts his fingertips over the already yellowing bruises under Jesper’s chin, trembling, the both of them. “This is what I want.”
Jesper falls into him like he’d severed whatever tether he’s been holding onto to keep himself upright. Wylan catches him, and holds him. Jesper mumbles apologies and wipes the tears from Wylan’s face and Wylan holds him, like he’d wanted to from the start.
They stay like that for a long time, until the sun comes fully out over the city and the day begins in Ketterdam anew. They stay right there, half on the floor of Kaz’s office and all but in each other's laps, with Wylan nosing at Jesper’s hair and Jesper hiding his face against Wylan’s neck, and pretending neither of them are crying at all.
“We’ll figure it out,” Wylan says, the same thing Jesper had told him when he’d started having nightmares in the Slat, when Wylan felt like he would drown in the memories haunting him every night. “We’ll figure it out.” And he wants it to be true.
Jesper nods against him. The position can’t be comfortable for him, Wylan thinks, though neither of them are keen to move just yet. Wylan presses his cheek to Jesper’s, still mindful of the bruising, kisses his temple, his jaw, the corner of his mouth. Just a little longer. Just a little more time. Just a little bit.
“You’re a good boyfriend,” he whispers into Jesper’s hair.
Wylan hasn’t had any other boyfriend other than Jesper, so he supposes he doesn’t have a great deal of experience to say so, but he knows, undoubtedly, that it’s true. Jesper Fahey is as good as they come. He’s kind—when he isn’t hurt and exhausted and, probably, in the beginnings of a wretched hangover. He isn’t cruel, ever, and especially not to Wylan. Wylan knows cruel. He knows words aimed to hurt and he knows eyes sharp as knives, he knows what it’s like to be hated and abandoned and made to feel like you are nothing. He knows barbed tongues and physical lashings and the sting of being hit by a hand you trust. He knows, just as he knows that Jesper is not that. Not even close. He never hurts him on purpose, and even when he does the apologies are swift and sincere. He isn’t the worst of himself, the sum of his mistakes—it isn’t the whole of him, it isn’t the truth.
The truth is in his warm breath against the skin of Wylan’s neck, the touch of his gun callused and soft fingertips under the hem of his shirt—gentle, caring, slightly needy in a way that always sets him alight—the ghost of his lips on his collar, murmuring only sweet things. “You’re good, Jesper.”
Jesper shakes his head against him. He’s sagging, pliant, disturbingly still but for that one motion.
“You are,” Wylan asserts. “I’ll tell you more, since it seems you need to hear it.”
It does the job of getting a dry chuckle out of Jesper. He kisses below Wylan’s ear softly, once, twice, and holds him a little tighter. “What do we do now?”
“Take me to bed, obviously.” He doesn’t say it’s been empty for too long, because he doesn’t want to remind him of it, but he thinks under different circumstances that Jesper would appreciate the innuendo regardless. Slowly, together, they stand up and make their way back to their little corner of the Slat. Their little perfectly imperfect room.
He’ll find Kaz later—once the dust has settled and he doesn’t feel like being more than a foot away from Jesper will rip him in two—and ask for the story in detail, whether they need to worry, or if there really isn’t anything hanging over Jesper’s head to label him a viable target in future. He wants to hear it all as much as he doesn’t. He needs to, and he trusts Kaz to give it to him truthfully and without cushioning. Wylan cannot afford to be coddled about this.
That’s not for now, not just yet. Right now, he’s much more concerned with helping Jesper into a fresh shirt and trying not to show how terribly he feels at the sight of the mottled bruising on his ribs. They get into bed—it’s far too late in the day for it now, though Wylan has a sneaking suspicion that Kaz will leave them uninterrupted just this once—and settle under the soft covers. Jesper calls him darling, calls him love; he wraps his arms around Wylan, and Wylan settles his head in the crook of Jesper’s neck and, just a little bit, the world is set back to rights.
It doesn’t take long for the bruises to heal. The ribs take longer, but those heal too, with time. Jesper keeps trying, and Wylan keeps telling him that it’s enough.
They’ll be fine.