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usmsgutterson · 2 years

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Oooh, with the medic one also. Could be half him watching her and her skills being impressed and in love, and the other half having her tell him what to do to treat her because she is deathly injured!!!!!!

Everything- Kaz Brekker

Hi! I'm going to hijack this ask to answer both this one, and the first part to it, which I used to ask if you'd be all right with me aging everyone up a little bit! This one is also a bit long, so apologies in advance!

You said that you were fine with it, so I did age everyone up a bit! Kaz, the crows, and the reader, are all around 25-27 years old.

Fic type- this one is fluff with some angst

Warnings- mentions of stab wounds, a punctured lung, chest tubes, lung fluid, treatment of a punctured lung that’s probably a little inaccurate (I googled how to treat it, google wasn’t very helpful) and kaz might be a little ooc

“You’re university trained?” Matthias asked as he watched you disinfect a wound on Inejs leg. “University, medical school, and you end up here?” He gestured around Fifth Harbor.

“As I’m sure you’ve come to understand, Mr. Helvar, the people are what makes this town a worth while one,” you said. You took a needle from your kit, grabbing a piece of thread with one hand as you held the needle steady with the other, blowing a speck of dust from it and wiping it over a clean area of your shirt before pulling the thread through the needle.

“Walking on it--”

“Matthias will carry you,” you glanced back at him, tilting your head as though you were waiting to hear his refusal. “Give it two hours of rest, at least. I know you’re the informant Kaz relies on the most, but an infection? The stitches opening? Not worth the risk.”

“How much time would be optimal?” Kaz asked. You didn’t need to look back to him to know he was watching you. You could feel his gaze, a burning but impressed look. It was one that seemed to be reserved for you, specifically, a gaze that communicated both that he was impressed and in love with you for the skill and ease with which you worked.

“Any jobs in the next few days?”

“You would know if there were any,” Kaz said. “You’re the one who reviews the plans, triple checks for any fatal risks, but if you need a reminder, no. No jobs until the one near the financial district in two weeks time.”

“That’s perfect,” you said, not grimacing as you brought the needle through one end of the wound, stitching into the other. “Rest, Inej. Take at least a week.”

Inej nodded, not saying a word or moving a muscle as you worked. The next ten minutes were quiet, ones where you were focused on getting Inejs wound stitched, Kaz was heading to the Slat to make sure a path was cleared, Nina was getting Inej some tea and Wylan, Jesper, and Matthias were keeping good company.

“All of the people in Ketterdam, and Brekker ends up with the medic. I kind of love it,” Nina said with a laugh about five minutes after you’d finished stitching Inejs leg, applying the pain relievant cream you kept in your kit and taping gauze over it in case of bleeding. You were all headed back to the Slat, Inej leaning on Matthias as she held the tea Nina had grabbed for her.

“I don’t mind it myself,” you said. “When Kaz gets himself in a bind, I’m there to make sure he lives through it. I’d call it a nice arrangement, the one we’ve got.”

You and your incredible wit could smooth talk anyone Kaz had pissed off, stitch the wounds he got from doing so, and Kaz had given you the job you had, one of the few medics working on the staff of the Dregs.

You’d known him since you were teens, Kaz having often seen you in the Barrel, stitching the wounds of the ones dumb enough to get hurt, using the minimal knowledge given to you by the medicine classes offered to Ketterdam University first years in order to do such a thing. You’d been running with the Dregs that long, too, having not been able to resist the company offered by the one so many called Dirtyhands.

Ten years later, it seemed to have proven worth it, if the ring you’d placed on a chain and the one that Kaz kept in the pocket of whichever pair of trousers he’d chosen to wear that day were at all considerable indications.

“A match made by the matchmaker saint,” Nina said.

“I don’t think there is one,” you said as you arrived at the Slat. Nina opened the door for Inej and you watched as Matthias carried her to her room, Nina standing not far off and talking to Inej as though it were just another normal Tuesday.

You bid Wylan and Jesper your goodnights before heading to the third floor, opening the door to the floor that yourself and Kaz had shared for half a decade.

You saw Kaz at his desk, gloves over his hands as he read the plans for the heist to take place two weeks from then. You placed your kit where you’d always placed it--second drawer of the night stand that was to the left of the bed--and walked back through his office, heading for the kettle, which Kaz had placed on a nightstand that he’d repurposed.

“Coffee or tea?” You asked as you turned the kettle on, merely flicking a switch at the bottom of the long handle, grabbing a mug from the drawer he kept them in. To one side, there was twelve mugs--stacked in two doubled up columns of three--and to the other, there was boxes of tea bags, filtered, and ground coffee

“Earl gray tea, if there’s any left,” Kaz said. At that, you turned to look at him, casting a look of disbelief. He shrugged.

“For once in my life, I’m not striving to stay awake,” he said. “Drank too much coffee, stressed a bit too much. I haven’t slept in days.” You laughed as you grabbed another mug, placing it next to the one you’d grabbed for Kaz. You grabbed earl gray and the ingredients to make your hot drink of choice, the conversation between you and Kaz as you waited for the kettle to be ready nothing of much note.

“Even so long after you returned from Ravka, I still find myself impressed whenever I watch you work in the field,” he said. “I couldn’t stomach it. I can handle giving myself a stitch up, but having to do it for someone else? I could never.”

You laughed as you heard the little song--a simple few robotic tones--that the kettle sang to tell you it was done. You poured water into Kaz’s mug and then into yours, adding sugar and stirring it in as you thought on your next words.

“It’s always been about the fact that I’ve been able to help people,” you said, shrugging. “Living in the Barrel, you get used to blood. You get used to screams of pain and keeping kvas in a flask just in case. I’ve never much been bothered by any of it. I’ve just wanted to do some good. Going to uni and then medical school helped me with that process.”

“Have you paid off all of the loans?” University and medical school cost a pretty penny, that was certain. The loans were ones you’d had on your back since you were twenty-one, loans that were being paid off using half of your paycheck from seeing to Ketterdam citizens in the few hospitals they’d built around the wealthier areas, all of the money you got from heists, be it for the part you played in them or the fact that you stitched up plenty of wound in the aftermath.

“The money I’ll get tomorrow from two weeks working at the hospital will have them paid off entirely,” you said. “Y/N L/N, debt free. I love how that sounds.”

You passed him the tea you’d made and he gently clinked his mug against yours in favor of a cheers.

“To being debt free,” you said.

“To getting richer.” Kaz said. “And to being impressed by the work of your spouse.”

You both took sips of your drinks, neither of you staying awake much longer after that.

---

As Kazs eyes opened, the first thing he registered was the fact that he was laying on the ground. He could feel the stickiness of near-dry pebbles refusing to detach from the sweat that’d beaded on the back of his neck, the weight of the pavement beneath him that was the precise opposite of comforting. He was on his back, eyes blinking at a dark, dreary sky as they opened.

The next thing he registered was the complete absence of the gloves he always wore. They were gone, and as Kaz sat up, looked around with a keen eye as one hand reached up to finally rid the saints awful feeling of the pebbles sticking to his neck, he couldn’t find them, nor his cane.

He heard it when you woke up, though. He heard the intake of breath, watched you reach a hand up to your right side.

“Kaz?” You wheezed. “Ghezen, if I was left alone here, I’ll kill you myself.”

“Threatening a god isn’t the smartest choice you’ve made,” Kaz fired back. “We were jumped, Y/N. Are you all right?”

“Can you stand?” You wheezed again. Kaz shuffled to the wall to his left, brought himself onto his feet. “Kit. I need my kit, Kaz. It has--” you stopped, coughing before trying to inhale.

He found your medicine kit, two feet off from where you lay on the ground, blood blossoming around the white of your shirt. He went for it instantly.

“Are you okay?”

“I was stabbed in the lung, the bastards,” you said, managing a laugh. “I can stitch myself up provided that I’m able to sit the fuck up and see what I’m stitching. A punctured lung prevents me from that. Fuck.”

The realization dawned on him as he took the kit into his hands, bringing it to his lap as he unzipped it. If you couldn’t do the stitching yourself, it meant that Kaz had to.

You’d touched one another before. You were the only person with whom touch had become even a semi-regular thing in Kaz’s life. Hands that accidentally met when you passed one another a coffee or a tea, hands resting atop one another for a mere few seconds as you settled in for dinner at a restaurant along Fifth Harbor.

Touching was sort of common. But those touches had always been small. None of them were as it was then, the alarming sort of reality that Kaz would have to do what it took to get you well enough to function, the likelihood that it involved getting your blood on his hands.

“Kaz, if you can’t manage--”

“If I can’t manage, the only other option is that you die, or that you almost die. I refuse to allow either of those outcomes.”

“I’m half-dead as we speak.”

“Yes, but it’s not almost too late. If I save you right now, the fact that you survived may not count as a miracle. Tell me what I need to do to help you, Y/N. Please.”

“A chest tube should be in there,” you said. “It’s long, has a bit of a pump attachment taped to it for convenience? Theres a needle at one end. It’s also clear and made of plastic. Get that.” Kaz did as instructed, holding it in one hand as he watched you fumble with the buttons around your shirt.

He undid them up to the area of the wound, folding the excess fabric back and securing it with some tape he’d found in the kit so as to keep it from moving.

“Attach the pump to the open end of the chest tube. The pump will catch the fluid build up in my lungs, keep it from getting onto the ground. Once you’ve done that, insert the tube into the cut and watch me never take simply breathing for granted ever again.”

Kaz did as you’d told him, attaching the pump to the open end of the tube and inserting the tube into the cut, grimacing and looking away as he did it.

He heard you take a long inhale, looked over and caught you grinning.

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I know its--unfortunate circumstances--”

“If you apologize for almost fucking dying, I’ll take the tube out of your lung and allow you to suffocate,” Kaz said. “We’ll wait ten minutes, I’ll stitch you up, and we’ll get home.”

You laughed. “Fine, Brekker,” you said. “Thank you.”

“I rather not live a life without you in it, is all,” he said, shrugging.

You waited ten minutes.

In those ten minutes, Nina came around with Kaz’s cane--the edge of which, it should be noted, was blood stained--and a vengeful smile. Inej wielded names and whereabouts. Jesper held the gloves Kaz kept in his office as back ups as Matthias explained that the gloves Kaz had been wearing hadn’t been found and Wylan checked the wound out for himself.

“You did good,” he said. “Even though you only followed the instructions given by a professional. A bit of a stitch up in two minutes and a trip to a hospital in the financial district if the pressure from the fluid hasn’t gone away are some good next steps.” As he spoke, Wylan helped you sit up halfly.

“Thank you, Brekker,” you said.

“You’re my partner in everything,” Kaz said. “I refuse to lose you, Y/N. I can’t even handle the idea.”

“I love you too,” you said. “Wylan, are you good with a needle?”

“I can stitch up the wound and Matthias can carry you back,” Wylan said with a nod. “I’ve never been too good with this sort of thing, but I can manage.”

“Are you feeling all right?” Kaz asked. You nodded.

“I’m okay, Kaz. You don’t need to worry about me, I’m fine. You’ve got names and whereabouts. Don’t go easy on the bastards.”

Kaz shook his head. “Going easy on them was never my intent,” he said.

“Good,” you grinned.

The seven of you made idle conversation as Kaz emptied the tube and waited an additional five minutes to be safe.

Upon the assurance that there was no more fluid left in your lung, he removed the chest tube completely, taking a bottle of water from Wylans satchel and cleaning it up so as to not have the fluid from your lung making a mess of the kit.

Wylan stitched the wound up and Matthias helped you off the ground, letting you lean against him as you walked back to the Slat. You and Kaz talked, pinkies interlaced as you spoke and moved.

“I need two weeks, Brekker,” you said. “I need the rest.”

“You’ll have three, then,” Kaz said, nodding as Matthias, Wylan, Jesper, Nina and Inej all went their separate ways, though you and Kaz stayed together. “Just to be safe, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you admit that you need time off.”

“Can’t really work very well with a lung wound,” you shrugged. “Three weeks of rest sounds wonderful. Thank you.”

“You’re my partner in everything,” Kaz said again. “Whatever you need.”

The two of you walked up to the third floor, both of you feeling relieved that the day had ended on a decent note.

#kaz brekker #kaz brekker x reader #six of crows

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sissytobitch10seconds · 7 months

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Febuwhump 17: Doctor Zenik

Fandom: Grishaverse: Six of Crows and Shadow and Bone Summary: Mathias is not the same. Warnings: Frankenstein (Mary Shelly) activities, dead characters, and violence Word Count: 1,239 Ship(s): Nina Zenik/Matthias Helvar

Archive link!

Every day that she had spent locked away in her laboratory was weighted on her shoulders. She could feel the notched tension in her shoulders increasing every time that she ended up falling into her slumber slumped over an operating table with the needle still in her hand. She could feel the way that her aches worsened, the level of pain that she endured from the very same accident that had killed her lover increasing. She could feel the way that her heart sank when a day passed and nothing more happened.

She wasn’t going to stop.

Not a single thing in the entire world was going to make her stop, not when she was so close that she could wrap her hands around it and choke the life from it. She was the most intelligent person in her university, hse knew the ins and outs of a human better than every other pupil that had decided to pursue a doctorate. She was willing to go the extra mile, to have the long nights and the gravedirt beneath her ragged fingernails. The blood and the bones had never scared her, she could dig his fingers and teeth into the vessels that had long since gone cold. She had access to all of the chemicals that stopped the bloat and stink of death but followed her like a cloud of death.

Everything would be worth it in the end. SHe wouldn’t let himself stop not because she couldn’t, but because it wouldn’t be fair to him. She was the one that had gotten him in that kind of a situation in the first place so she was the one that was going to fix it. She had promised him that she would bring him back, that she would make sure that they could spend the end of their days together like they had been promising since they were young.

Nina knew what she was doing, but it seemed as though forces outside of her control also did. She had almost been caught by the officers of the state when she was getting her last couple of organs. It had been something that she knew that she couldn’t do without, it would leave Matthias incomplete. The heart and lungs were sitting in the tray of saline next to her as they waited to be entered in the body on her kitchen table. She supposed that she was something like the scientist she had heard of in the Americas, keeping her small apartment dark and cold so that she could slow the passage of time on a decaying body. The difference here was that she wasn’t going to let it be found out because of someone that was too nosey for their own good.

She had already told off the boy in her class that she had borrowed the chemicals from. She knew that Wylan was lonely. She knew it more than anyone else in the entire school because she felt it just as deeply as he did. She knew what it was like to languish on the cold nights, longing for the company of a single other person to help and try to warm her. She knew what it was like when a thought rattled around in one’s mind until it could be spoken aloud and shared with another, yet there was no one to do that. She knew, intimately, the hurt and burn of losing someone.

Nina sat in front of the massive table that she had placed in the center of her dorm room. She had the ice chest containing the heart, perfect and from a boy around the same age as Matthias, next to her. She had already reopened his chest, which she sealed every night to try and keep the other organs in their perfect condition. The next step was to carefully lift the heart from the container and then set it in his chest.

She had to thread the needle before she even got the organ out of its storage, so she just picked it up and began the careful process of sewing the veins of the heart into the veins of the rest of his body. She thought for a moment that she could hear the voice of her mentor in the background, telling her that what she was doing was an abomination to the name of science and religion alike. She was going against the natural order of the world and declaring herself a god.

Nothing could stop her now, not when she was already so close.

She threw the last stitch in the skin of his chest after she had attached and double checked every other part of his body. She had to make sure that every part of him was perfect, that he was put back together the way that a waking god like him deserved. She had already had too many failures, organs that were too weak for what she was doing and seams that had been done while half asleep.

Nina took a step back from the table as she looked over her work. There was only one thing that she had to do to complete her project. It was something that she had rolled over and over in her head for a long while, but it made sense given what had to be done to someone that had just died. After all, her Matthias had essentially reversed back to look as though the bullet had only taken him out moments ago.

She placed her hand on the edge of the table and then hauled herself up onto it. She swung her leg over his hip so that she was straddling his waist before she placed both of her hands above his newly inserted heart. She pressed down steadily in the rhythm of her own heartbeat so that they would live by the same essence. Every so often, she would lean down and blow life into his mouth so that he would breathe again.

She tired after nearly an hour of working to make the final steps fall into place. Again, Nina had come too far and worked too long to let it all go to waste. Despite the aching in her arms and the buckling of her straining muscles, she kept the motion with the same steady pattern that she had before. She removed herself from him when she heard the first groan.

Her eyes were wide and her own breath had been stolen from her lungs for him. “Matthias?” she asked, her voice as small as a child’s might be.

“What did you do to me?” his bright blue eyes snapped open and turned to her immediately. His voice didn’t sound like it had when he was alive the first time. She knew that he was once again living, that was the entire point of desecrating the graves and hours of stitching. He was a live and yet he was not himself.

“I brought you back. I said that I would,” she replied, rather indignantly. He had never treated her like this before.

He launched himself off of the table with a single, swift movement. After the muscles had been still for so long, she hadn’t expected him to be able to muster that kind of movement. She also didn’t expect the sheer strength that exuded from him when he wrapped his hands around her throat and squeezed.

#fanfiction #fanfic #writing #ao3 #archive of our own #sab #shadow and bone #soc #six of crows #nina zenik #matthias helvar #matthias x nina #nina x matthias #frankenstein #helnik

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chaoticwhoknows · 2 years

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what if i told you that through me (the flood) is the thread that connects matthias helvar and kaz breaker as people? what if i told you that the whole opening verse was both of their life stories rolled into a few lines?

#hozier #soc #six of crows #s&b #shadow and bone #leigh bardugo #matthias helvar #kaz brekker #nina zenik #inej ghafa #jordie rietveld #i’ll explain this in the form of a fic or a very long essay if even one person asks for it #but it really requires a line by line picking apart #(or an edit but idk how to make those)

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lady-of-imladris · 1 year

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Get to know me

thank you for tagging me @starlady66 and @thesolarangel <3

PART ONE

Are you named after anyone: nope, I think my mom just looked at a baby name book

when was the last time you cried? Last week on the bus home because I was drunk and feeling lonely lol

do you have kids? nope

do you use sarcasm a lot: ALL THE TIME

what's the first thing you notice about people? probably their general appearance (clothes, hair)?

what's your eye colour: blue, but I have central heterochromia, so they are kinda yellow-ish around the iris

scary movies or happy endings: happy endings

any special talents: languages I guess

where were you born?: Austria

what are your hobbies?: knitting, crochet, sewing (everything to do with thread and fabric), reading, and a new addition: d&d

have any pets?: I have a cat :)

what sports do you play/have played?: I used to play tennis

how tall are you?: 1,69 ish, but I usually wear platform shoes lol

favourite subject in school?: french and english

dream job?: I'd love to do something with Interface Design

PART TWO

first ship: probably Arthur/Gwen from Merlin? Can't remember anything before that

three ships: Eowyn/Faramir (i LOVE THEM), Nina Zenik/Matthias Helvar (from Six of Crows), Halbrand/Galadriel

last (current) song: August by Taylor Swift

last movie: The last movie I remember watching was Pirates of the Carribean 4, but that was like a month ago lol

currently reading: Pride and Prejudice, Legends and Lattes (and probably 5 other books I forgot about)

currently watching: The Mandalorian

currently consuming: just had some pasta for dinner

currently craving: a moscow mule (I had one two weeks ago and I loved it)

I'm tagging (without pressure) @fenharel-enaste

#get to know me #tag game #thanks for tagging me <3

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rotzaprachim · 2 years

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happy saturday besties! I’ve been working on my nina/helnik Hell Fic (tm) for a year now and felt. like i needed to have at least some of it up, for public record, for my own personal accountability that this is a body of words that exists in some fashion aside from in my head. (we’re clocking at about 60k rn and no where near finished.) so enjoy this spoiler-tastic, rough and marked-up section from square in the middle, which I slammed out in an afternoon while on an essay crisis and which convinced me there was an interesting story here I actually wanted to tell. TW for this being based on a YA novel, but very very adult in a lot of themes and implications

They stopped to eat the lunch Gudrun wrapped for them in waxed brown paper. Brown bread slathered thickly with fat and some oily, salty fish that filled Nina with the gloriously human smell of smoke. She had handfulls of dried berries in her pockets and dried lamb in her pack and she did not wish to think of the fact that here she was living of enemy kindnesses. They ate in silence and then dipped quickly into the water they melted down in the morning. Nina carefully licked all the crumbs from her greased fingers. “We need to talk,” she says. “We need to move so that we don’t turn cold,” Matthias said. He pulled himself to his feet and started to walk in his long, bow-legged strides, leaving Nina sputtering over her own feet to catch up. Her shawl flapped about her shoulders with a surprising degree of noise and stinging force. “Wait, wait,- oh for fuck’s sake, Lars.” This caused him to pause, at least momentarily, and look at her. “Do you always try to run when people want to talk to you? Honestly, Djel only knows why you still haven’t a wife.” “Mmph,” grunted the king of social graces. “What we’re going to do, mister, is walk through who Lars Solverson is.” “Why aren’t we doing this for Mila Jandersdat?” “Because Mila Jandersdat is a real fucking person already. This isn’t even my country and Mila Jandersdat’s not the problem.” “You… you made her up.” “And?” “She isn’t real.” Nina shrugged her shoulders. As if that mattered a whit.

“Go on, then. Ask Mila anything. Make polite conversation with Mila. Interrogate her, if you wish.” He thought for a moment. It was probably very taxing on him to use every one of his five brain cells. “What is Mila’s… favorite color?” “Pink.” He nodded squarely, satisfied. “Go on then, ask another.” “What is Mila’s favorite supper?” “Stewed elk and putrified shark. But if neither presents itself, I am more than satisfied with cold blueberry soup, with cream.” “A woman of good Fjerdan tastes,” he says appreciatively before suddenly pausing. “Wait-“ She smiles sweetly and batts her eyelashes. Bless the poor lad, although he’s becoming quickly keener to her devious nature. She hopes he doesn’t get too quick-witted, though, or else she’ll loose the best craic she’s got immediate access to, fucking around with the motherfucker who’se never been fucked. “Is every question you ask Mila going to be so dull? Does Mila have no hobbies or desires?” His eyes immediately flick away from her face. “A Fjerdan man with any sense of decency would never ask an unmarried woman he does not know such things. An unmarried Fjerdan girl would not even think of such things to begin with.” “Indeed. But Mila Jandersdat has not in a near decade’s time been an unmarried woman, and Lars knows her very well.” “Why-“ “Go on. Make it a question for Mila.” “Where is your [hejmland], Mila?” “A [vik] of medium size, downriver from the centerlands.” Matthias flinches, and Nina smiles inwardly at what a job she’d done with placing his accent. “Mila is just a simple farming girl. Her family grew potatoes and sugar beets, and fished, and had a cow called Rose-Maret who it was Mila’s job to take to the out-pasture with two or three of the younger brothers and sisters.” He weighed the story as rounded another snow-packed crest. Guðrún had given them extensive directions towards the next vik which Nina had understood none of and was now again reliant on the in no way tender mercies of Matthias’s navigational skills. “If Mila had such a humble origin, then why does she speak and write in Fjerdan like the Djerholm [gentry?]” Nina’s mind went blank. Every time Matthias revealed a brain under all that muscle, it was a more unpleasant surprise than anything. “Mila’s mother did laundry and washing in the house of the strong-holders such that Mila be taught something of arithmetic and geography, for Mila has so clever a child as learnt by heart the entire [Djelsprayer] hornbook at the tender age of eight, so wickedly clever is this woman Mila Jandersdat.” “And so dainty and humble as well.” “Indeead, the strong-holder’s wife became so taken by the wit and charms of Mila Jandersdat that she became very dear to the old woman, such that with no daughter and the all the sons gone off to war, she began to think of Mila as something of a niece and taught her what she knew of pincushion-embroidery and delicately plucking “Onward Fjerdan Soldiers” on the mandolin.” At this Matthias guffawed loudly. “And what of it?” “Mila would never sweetly play anything, let alone the mandolin.” Nina pursed her lips, suddenly shockingly cross at how this doltish soldier without an ounce of good culture to his name was judging the ladylike refinements of Mila Jandersdat. “Mila is a delicate Fjerdan flower.” At this Matthias guffawed still louder. It was a sound that shook his whole body and that she might have liked to hear more of if it had not been directed at her. “Mila may be a treacherously beautiful woman, but she is no delicate flower. She’s like the lurid blue wood-lichen that makes the bread-flour last a winter or else the arctic heather that nothing can stop from growing, not even the frost.” “All of this you know of Mila,” she huffed. “As you said, Lars know her very well.” In this way it continued. It gave them both something to do that felt like a more acceptable category of treason. In falling grey evenings and around campfires Lars and Mila came to increasingly fleshed life, and by laughing about it Nina could do what she’d always done when faced with the dizzyingly difficult, which was treat the task as a game. Mila Jandersdat was a woman of clever wits and a few human foibles for which she was all the more charming. She could dance a reel and tell a dirty joke and won blue ribbons for her cloudberry jam recipe. She was a big sister to all and the sort of friend with whom one might uncork a bottle of currant wine for a long chat in order to feel better about the world. “A good Fjerdan woman would not drink wine or brandy, or that which contains such spirits as may possess a soul.” “A bottle of honeywater,” Nina corrected herself, glaring. She assumed this would mollify him, but he then elaborated, “neither would she have the coin to buy such strong drink.” “Fine. Mila Jandersdat always has coffee and something sweet and a good bit of conversation for the guest who may darken her doorframe. There’s bread dough rising on the counter and some cider cake under a dome to keep the flies out and there’s a pie cooling on the windowsill with the fluttering lace curtains. There are always good things for the unexpected stranger to eat. And no one in Mila’s household is ever hungry. No one.” Her mouth felt dry. She huffed in breath. “What a marvel of feminine hospitality is Mila Jandersdat! What a wife does Lars have!” “A good Fjerdan housewife would never waste so much pay on sugar and trifles.” “Would not Lars the good Fjerdan husband provide for his wife so as to keep her in comfort?” And so it went. The found the next farm stead, and the one after, and worked several days in each place at the weaving and haying in exchange for a pile of gloriously warm blankets on the floor and the Kvöldvaka light. Everywhere it was immeidately known how they were breaking the most clear-cut of wartime laws and ever time the wordlessly provided excuse was understood in full sympathy and some variety of spell, prayer, or enchantment was cast upon Mila’s womb so that it may take her husband’s seed and bear his family fruit. “Maybe Lars has a low sperm count,” she groused as they walked off. The housemistress told them they had at least another week through the blackrock but that there would not be more than a lone overnight camping between farmsteads and Nina breathed a sigh of relief before realising that meant trading the danger of open landscape for the more specific domestic dangers of the people that wanted to burn her kind to ashes. “Lars does not have a- what that is,” Matthias said defensively, before more trepiditiously asking, “what is that?” “You’re not ready.” According to Matthias’s fictions, Lars Sølverson was pious, self-sufficient, sturdy, moral, dependable, reliable, and altogether decent. He provided for his wife in way that was comfortable and yet economically prudent as befits the sort of upstanding man who is not in debt and neither will pass on a debt to his children. He did not partake of strong drink. His eyes did not wanter off to strange women, and as such he had not brought home diseases of an indiscrete nature or begotten any bastards, He always did a day’s honest work except for on Djel’s Day, which he spent in prayer and fellowship. He was well-liked among men. “How lucky was Mila to have found such a man,” said Nina before she belatedly remembered that the word she had used did not mean “lucky” so much as “blessed.” “Every well-suited match is a blessing from Djel, but Mila was not particularly singular, for that is the sort of Fjerdan man who can be found in any farm, or meeting-house, or regiment-camp. There is nothing (unique) about Lars being an upstanding and morals-driven Fjerdan man.” {INSERT BRIDGE-EXPLANATION OF HOW LARS AND MILA MET)

“Her brother wanted to marry her to a blacksmith whose work shoeing carriage horses meant there would always be bread on her plate and fire enough to keep her warm in th, e winter, and what man in Fjerda could offer her more? The blacksmith had a braying, crass way of speaking about “his woman,” and he looked at her a if she was a dressed leg of lamb, but her children would likely never be too hungry nor too cold. And so she was happy with her lot as she might be, and one day was buying new dress-hooks to fix her mother’s wedding dress when she saw him walking in the marketplace, and wanted him.” “So he knocked upon her father’s door-“ Matthias tried to jab in sideways. “So he made her a wedding ring of dentist’s gold and they ran off into the night.” “Lars would never have ruined her like that.” “Mila Jandersdat is a woman, not a broken platter. She isn’t ruined.” “He would never have broken her honour in front of her family or her community so that she could never have returned home. Lars knew a woman worth more than rubies what he saw one, even staring boldly-“ “I was not staring boldly! I was making eyes in a lavicious, untoward manner-“ “So he asked of her name, and learned it was Mila Jandersdat. That very evening he knocked at her father’s door. He was invited to dinner as any a wandering soul might be. He dined with her family three times before he was left alone with her and before the courting could begin. He took her father to meet his and see the sort of place he would have to his name and if were a godly sort of people he had come from.” “Mila’s mother and sisters dug through the scraps bin to start the Hringsa quilt,” she said. They would have taken the drinking glasses and candlesticks off of the dining table to pin out the little pieced-out triangles into the trunk and roots and leaves of the Tree of Life, and then they would have stitched it together in a winter’s worth of Kvöldvaka [Kvoldvakar?] after they’d done their National Service, spinning from their own sheep the sails of druskelle ships. Mila cut into strips the nut-brown tablecloth to make the trunk of her tree, for the living, and unravelled her too-small childhood mittens into the yarn with which stitched a spinning fractal of strong roots for the ancestors. She cut up her own baby blanket for the good green cloth with which to stitch the leaves. When it was done Mila folded the blanket and put it into the carved wooden chest of her bridal troseau and when she and her mother unfolded it over her marriage bed on the morning of her wedding, it would have been a sort of marking of territory. A national flag for a different sort of nation. And in the evening, jittered from cake and nerves, Mila would have run her index finger over the sturdy interfitting of triangles- the blue calico of her aunt’s apron, the red triangle of her other’s kirk shawl- while she waited on the bed for her husband to come in from the party, and have her. Lars and Mila fucked on that quilt. When she pinned the thing on the line to air out during the spring cleaning and everyone passing by could see, it was also a sort of declaration. When a fortnight after her marriage she woke to find her belly cramping and blood sticking to the insides of her thighs, she cried. As she rubbed out the stains with baking soda and river water she thanked Djel there was no child yet twisting inside of her. When five years on she did the same, she railed against her wretchedness, her godless condition, because that was an easier thing to stomache than the notion that the All-Source of All-Water had closed her womb in punishment for her sinful being. {insert something to return back to main narrative} Nina looked up, which was somehow a struggle. Mila was the full rushing force of a tidal wave pulling her under the water. She was as real as anything. “He must have loved her a lot,” she said, her tongue heavy. “To keep her as his wife. Mila. Lars’s wife. After eight years and no sons unto his name.” [Lars was not real. Lars was as real as the cardboard cutouts Kerch pleasure-piers stuck outside bordellos to advertise the enticements inside. Nina did want to think about what you’d find if you tipped Lars over.] “No honorable man would leave a woman he had made his wife to the cold like that.” Nina shrugged. “Even if she slept in his bed and ate his bread off his hard earned soldier’s wage and gave him no issue?” Matthias’s fingers worried at the hem of his trousers. He did not want to talk about this, she supposed. He wanted to talk about this more than anything. “Only a cruel man would blame the hand of Djel upon a woman.” “Then we live in a world full of cruel men.” All of the breached babies and ectopic pregnancies and angry, angry husbands. Sometimes it felt like more of a battle to serve in the domestic wards than it had been to dig out bullets from shoulders a half-hour from the front line. And more direct threats on her life, besides. Everyone knew that witches killed babies, and baked cakes from their blood, and cursed them to be born early, and quickened women with seven at home already and too-eager husbands, and everyone knew that witches turned sons to daughters with the flick of a wrist and a few esoteric sayings. Everyone knew. Matthias looked into Nina’s eyes. He did not try to tell her that Fjerdan men were not cruel. Not even the honorable Fjerdan men.

#A hartz iz nisht kein meleks trone #hell fic #nina zenik #matthias helvar #i would have your ghost #my writing #it's at like ....2.5 k for this section but 60k overall and this section relies on some longer running plot threads and themes #undercover work tee hee #if it clarifies and or spoils everything: one of the key insert themes of the fic is that nina and matthias went undercover as an ordinary #fjerdan couple during the endless ice hike so there's pretending to be married drama

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