#before this learning curve my brownies were always a big hit but not counting it

[flintbian]

Life achievement: three people have asked for my recipes after trying my food (five if including desserts)! 😁

[rotzaprachim]

the closest to heaven that i'll ever be (Kanej Guardian Angel AU)

From @elorcaning‘s prompt of Kaz just being an idiotic human getting in trouble all the time and inej is his guardian angel just trying to keep him from dying while doing stupid shit, which I thought was a BRILLIANT idea and kinda ran with. At 1 AM while on jetlag so I Apologise. 

Props to @kettvrdams for not killing me when i sent an incomprehensible WIP for her to beta. All accidentally unfinished sentences and spelling errors are entirely My Own Fault 

On AO3 - 1816 words, Teen

In her illustrious career as a guardian angel, Inej has learned several things. The first is to believe in the fundamental good of all people- well, almost all people. Almost. But really, she likes to think the best.

The second thing is that no matter how hard she tries- and damn, she really tries hard- humans will still find ways to screw their own lives over, and even if her role is supposed to be more hypothetical or spiritual than anything, she always finds herself getting involved in more practical ways.

But still she thinks, as the poor Dutch farm kid tries to eat fertiliser from the container for the third time, only to be shooed away by his older brother, that this is going to be a challenge.

--o0o--

“Organised crime? Really?” sneers a figure in the corner of the precinct station with their dark hood pulled down low. Kaz glances around. There isn’t anyone else around aside from the beat cop who’s just let him out of the holding shell with a glare and a kick to his good shin.

The figure pulls their hood down. It’s a girl about his own age. Looks like a university student, with a purple jacket and a rain slicker.

She holds out a plastic Albert Hejn bag. Ah. So this is what it’s about. Per Haskell, Pekka Rollins, whoever the fuck it is this time, want him to move something. Cash, drugs, fucking tulip bulbs for all he knows. He doesn’t really care, as long as he’s alive on the other side of it.

But it isn’t really heavy enough to be either of those things.

“You haven’t eaten anything in over twenty four hours.”

He doesn’t know how she could possibly know that, but when he looks inside, what he finds is a cheese sandwich and a bottle of orange juice. Sealed, so it would have been goddamn hard to hide a USB or whatever it is Pekka wants out of the country inside.

“Who sent you? Pekka? Ferry Bouman? Sonny Castillo?”

“Are those the only things your mind goes to?” Now the girl just sounds annoyed.

“I’m not in the habit of beautiful girls meeting me in police precincts without having some other angle they’re working. So what is it? Who do you work for?”

Beautiful girl. He didn’t mean to say that. He’s a lot of things, but a flirt isn’t one of them. Yet even in the yellowy light of the precinct, he can tell that's what she is, with her heart-shaped face and the fan of her oil-dark hair.

“Eat your damn sandwich” she says, and is gone before he can say anything else.

--o0o--

“Don’t get too involved,” says Zoya.

“The job description is guardian angel, ergo, I guard.”

--o0o--

Organised crime. Really. Perhaps not in the highest echelons, and it’s fucking Amerstedam, but still, organised crime.

Sometimes she really doesn’t think he’s organised enough to get mixed up in organised crime.

--o0o--

“Genuine Givenchy. Also got Rolex watches, Hugo Boss shirts-” he offers the middle-class housewives out on a girl’s trip to Amsterdam. The back of the florist’s he’s operating out of is packed with genuinely decent-looking fakes. It’s also on Sonny Castillo’s territory.

“Best space brownies in Amsterdam,” he promises a group of tipsy Erasmus students from Manchester with a smile that’s the image of sincerity. The coffee shop is on Ferry Bouman’s territory.

“Now this is a real Vermeer,” he tells the new-money-oil-don looking for a bit of old-school, Cultured, flash for his new penthouses in Dubai and London. The art gallery is on Pekka Rollins’ territory.

--o0o--

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Inej tells her boss.

--o0o--

“You think I can’t smell a rat, Brekker? You don’t fucking think I can’t tell when some bastard ratfuck tries to fuck me over?”

There have been many points during which Kaz thought his ass to be well and truly cooked. Almost drowning in the harbour in Rotterdam when he was twelve was certainly one of them, but it was also far from the last.

But now he’s got a gun to his temple and there’s no more talking he can do, not one more trick more trick up his sleeve or one more secret he can leverage into five more minutes, ten more minutes, another day to make things right.

There’s just him and a dark alley at the edge of the city and the freezing rain, pelting down and soaking him to the bone. And the angry hands slamming his face into the alley wall, over and over again, until blood runs down his face and chest and the rainwater tastes salty.

“Please. A week. No, a day, I’ll make it up-”

“Like last time you promise me, huh? Promise me twenty thousand? And then I find out you shelling out ten thousand Euros to Ferry Bouman to keep selling on Pekka Rollin’s turf. He ain’t gonna forget this, boy-”

“Ten thousand. I can get you ten thousand, you know I can-”

He sees the flash of a gun being raised, can almost feel the air change as the man pulls back the trigger, and then-

Like a flash of lightning, the moment after the fireworks go off. Light everywhere, the snap of sound of thunder, condensed, and then-

In the moment after the light, Kaz can’t see a thing. And then he can: the three grunts Pekka sent after him, lying in an alley, and the remains of several guns, incinerated to crisps. And the flash of something, a person maybe, going around the corner.

“THE FUCK ARE YOU?” He screams into the pouring rain, but no response comes back.

--o0o--

Sometimes, Inej wants to scream at him so loud he can hear it.

“And what were you expecting, exactly? Why can’t you just. . . .” she thinks of the words she hears people using, these days, “stay in your darn lane? You waste your mathematics scores dealing. You waste your German scores on conning tourists. You just . .. you waste your life.”

He’s had the pinched face of a businessman, and an older man, since his parents died. Since his brother died, and he spent his youth pinballing between foster homes and getting increasingly involved in things that the Korps Nationale Politie tend to take a rather dim view of. In all that time, though, she’s rarely seen fear on his face like this. She almost wants to reach out, across the train, tuck the edges of his carefully slicked-back hair back behind his ear, but she doesn’t.

“Why couldn’t you have just . . . stuck to selling overpriced marijuana to tourists or designer knockoffs from behind a tulip stand? Forging Vermeers? Stealing actual Vermeers?”

--o0o--

It’s only when he gets off at Utrecht Centraal that he notices an unfamiliar weight to his jacket pocket.

A neatly folded wad of cash. He flips through it gingerly. Twelve thousand euros.

--o0o--

“You can’t save his ass every time. Otherwise, he’ll never learn, and he’ll go beyond the point where you can save him.”

“But if I don’t save his ass now, he’ll die before he can learn.”

“Ah. That’s the eternal conundrum, isn’t it? Of the teacher and of the guardian angel.”

--o0o--

It’s not a particularly big country, but every time the train ride seems to last all day, and stretch into the night. Inej, at least, doesn’t need to buy a ticket. He buys flowers at Amsterdam Centraal. Changes trains at Maastricht and then again to a rural line, until he gets off at a station that’s nothing more than a strip of concrete alongside the track in a rain-soaked wheat field. There’s no taxis, no buses, only a long road through the countryside and the remainders of a life he’s tried to forget about at the end of it. He unfolds his walking cane and gets a move on.

On a hill, on a farm where the apple orchards have gone to seed and the roof of the house fallen in:

Annemarie and Jawad Rietveld. And a scratched out stone for Jordaan Rietveld.

He leaves the flowers, not particularly giving a fuck about the fact that he could be shot, right here and now, by Pekka Rollins, because this is Pekka Rollins’ land, even if it was Jawad Rietveld’s land first, and then Albert Rietveld’s land before that, even if, on a day so far removed from Kaz’s present life that it feels like someone else’s life entirely, Kaz thought that it would be Jordaan Rietveld’s land in the future.

He feels, in a way, her presence before he can see her.

“I know you’re there.”

She sighs and makes herself visible.

“It’s you. The girl on the train.”

“I don’t think so-” she says, taking on a heavy Flemish accent just in case he remembers her from the police precinct in Groningen. “I’m from Ant-”

“You. Your face.” I could never forget you face, he thinks. The police precinct, and then the train to Utrecht Centraal. A rare sunny day in this pit of gloom and rain, and the way that the sunlight hit her lashes, the curve of her cheeks, the splash of her dark hair, made him think that it was impossible there wasn’t something divine and benevolent in this life, and this world. “Police precinct up North. Gronigen. Train. Amsterdam. Everywhere i go you’re always-” He thinks about pulling the shiv from his pocket. Anyone so interested in following him certainly has ulterior motives, and yet-

“What are you? Why are you always- there?”

“I don’t think, Mr. Brekker, that your . . . theological opinions would permit you to believe me when I tell you what, exactly, I am.”

He shrugs. “Grandson of lapsed NHK’ers and Javanese Sunnis. No god helped them a whit. I don’t think God, if they ever existed, ever looked at this drowning spit of dirt.”

“I think there are many who wouldn’t disagree with you. Some of them, like myself, being of a divine persuasion.”

“Why are you here?”

She doesn’t answer, just turns towards the graves. A light rain has started to fall.

“Do you think you’re following the path they’d be proud of?”

--o0o--

“You know I count as a fucking mature student? Mature.”

Even she has to laugh.

“I’m fucking twenty three. Twenty three. I got carded trying to buy a beer yesterday.”

“But now a student.”

He flashes his new, shiny plastic student card at her. The photo on it still looks like a mugshot.

“What are you studying?”

“Politics. International Relations. How different can the European Council be from the mob, really? Common Agricultural Policy, pay off Europol, work some backroom deals to get shit done.”

Inej resists the urge to burrow her forehead in her jacket sleeves. There are, it turns out, many, many ways for a human to get themselves killed, on this world.