Chapter Text
Kaz Brekker is a genius. At least, that was what his exam papers say- everything else says he's a freak (his cane, his limp, his crooked nose, his dark, glistening eyes). But that's okay, because 'freak' is a status he can work with. Freak can mean one of two things:
A freak is someone who is classified as 'weird' by the popular consensus of the high school population; someone who eats their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a toilet cubicle, who is beaten up by jocks after school, who asks why Nina Zenik broke up with Matthias Helvar, as though it isn't already obvious.
Or, a freak is someone who is simply different. Kaz is different, has always been different, and he uses it as a weapon, like the sleek black cane he holds tightly in his gloved hands. Something that shouldn't be dangerous (in fact, should be a source of pity) is now something to fear, something to avoid. As the other students dip their heads with a nervous tremor when they see him limping (he limps everywhere in life, and raises hell when he arrives) along the long hallways of Ketterdam High, Kaz holds his proud and aloft.
No one dares touch him; not after the first day when someone did and he'd broken three of their fingers with one heavy boot. It was their fault- he told them to back off, and they didn't (they never do; words aren't enough) so he lashed out, with fists and elbows and snarled obscenities. He fights rough and dirty and fast- street fighting, they call it. Or, survival. Because that's what it'd been for Kaz. When they found him, curled up in a dark alleyway, he'd pulled a knife and threatened to 'drag their guts out from between their shiny white teeth' if they came any closer. And he would've, if they hadn't mentioned Jordie's name, and the knife clattered from his hands as though it burned, as though his hands were too weak to keep clutching onto it as tightly as he was (because maybe if he keeps holding that knife in that alley on that night he'll forget Jordie, forget everything- God, he wants to forget). Jordie has always been his weakness.
Kaz thinks in logical steps (because sometimes logic is the only thing that makes sense) and carefully thought out, detailed plans (read as: garbled, reckless spur-of-the-moment dares), so it's no surprise that Language Arts isn't his favourite subject. He prefers maths, because at least he knows there's an answer, a definite, sure answer that he knows he's gotten right, knows as well as his name (although sometimes, when the nights become suffocating and unbearably hot and the sky presses down on him, around him, and all he can feel is Jordie's hand pressed in his, he isn't all that sure he can remember it anymore because there's only Jordie, and there's always Jordie and it's just Jordie, Jordie and nothing else).
Language Arts drags on, on and on and on and on, and Kaz can't help but swipe a hand through the shorn hair bordering his head, stealing a swift, longing glance at the clock, the second hand dragging around achingly slowly. Five minutes. Only five minutes left. He can do this.
He turns his weary gaze back to the blank notepaper before him, tapping his pen against it impatiently. He hasn't bothered to write anything. Doesn't care. It doesn't interest him, and he doesn't see the point in pursuing something he doesn't like (but then again, there are so many things in life he chases that he doesn't like).
When the bell rings, it's a relief.
He doesn't bother to pack up his things because he knows he'll be back. He's always back.
* * *
Inej Ghafa is kind. Well, according to her friends (she refuses to call them 'colleagues' like Kaz- because they aren't, they're her friends) she is. Ask anyone else, and she's scary. She shouldn't be though, because Inej isn't the type of girl who looks scary in any way, shape or form- she's short, made up of angles and lines, but she's one of those people who somehow make angles seem soft and lines seem round because everything about her is warm- her skin, her eyes, her smile, her laugh, her hands. Her skin is dark, a rich caramel shade as though she's been dipped in the candy, and the sugar coating her is infectious.
When she smiles, crows feet crinkle at the corners of her large, dark eyes, because she's one of those people who smiles often- so often, in fact, that the motion has left marks in her body, in the form of small creases. But, of course, there are other marks left on her body from things far less pleasurable than smiling. Your body is a temple. Others didn't seem to treat it that way.
She's young, too- only seventeen, but she's seventeen and alone. They're all seventeen and alone, they're all seventeen, and they're all just trying to find something, someone, anyone to cling to, to hold on so tight they'll never let go, because they know if they do they'll fall and if they fall they'll never get back up, and being trapped in the air is better than being free on the ground.
Her gaze is focused intently on the careful graphite words she scratches out with painstaking care, every character rounded and carved into the page with copious amounts of effort, as if every word counts (and it does, because they all matter, every single one- and there are pages of them).
She writes in pencil, because she knows by now that nothing's permanent.
* * *
Jesper is okay. Jesper's always okay, always fine, always on the ball, but that's not enough. Okay has never been enough, and no one ever seems to be satisfied with 'okay'. So he builds himself something which is more than just okay, more than a whispered 'sorry' in the skin of someone who never deserved apology- but when he builds it, it shatters into shards and cuts him, cuts the soles of his feet, his hands, his face, his neck, his arms as he stumbles through the wreckage of what he worked so hard to build. But he picks himself up and tries again, because in the end he knows it'll be worth it if he's more than ok.
His skin is the inside of a cocoa bean, smooth and bitter and dark, different from the vivid caramel of Inej's and sometimes he wishes it wasn't, because when Kaz looks at Inej, it's like all he wants to do is touch her, and keep touching her until he's brushed up against every lovely inch of her and Jesper isn't that, Jesper isn't lovely. Jesper is rough and sharp and hard to touch, and he wishes he was soft like Inej.
The led of his mechanical pencil snaps as he presses down against the lined paper a fraction too hard, and he curses at the dent it leaves in his lovely, unblemished writing. Well, he thinks it's lovely- others can't even read it. His y's join onto his t's and his c's look far too similar to his o's, and his words are disjointed and ugly, flecks of missing dots above i's scattered about the page.
They said his writing is too dark for someone his age, too sad, too disturbing, so he cultivates his hand until they can't read it anymore, until the only comment people can make on it is in regards to his handwriting.
Sometimes Jesper's not sure if he's okay at all. Other times he thinks it doesn't matter.
* *
Wylan is innocent. Well, not that innocent. But he certainly looks the part, with his wide, soft, blue eyes (sometimes people think they can see clouds drift across them), fair, creamy skin and and golden halo of hair. He's the sun and the sky, and sometimes the sun passes behind a cloud and the sky starts to rain. Wylan's sky rains a lot.
When he laughs, he clamps a sweater clad hand over his rosy lips, as though it's a secret, muffling his mirth in long, clever fingers. But he doesn't laugh a lot, anyway. Doesn't talk a lot, either. The less he speaks, the less they have to hold against him- the less his father has to hold against him.
His father never touches him, but there are scars on his body that will never heal. When Jesper flings an arm around him for the first time, he flinches, and he doesn't know why because it feels good. It burns and it burns and it burns and it burns, but he loves the flames. Jesper's so casual when he touches Wylan, like he doesn't know that every time he does Wylan can feel the fire eat at him a little more, because Jesper doesn't know, doesn't know anything at all.
Wylan doesn't write, either. Actually, that's not true, because he does (he writes pages and pages and pages), but not of what they want to see. He doesn't write letters, he writes notes, long black stalks connecting neatly onto rounded ovals, sitting squarely between lines, obedient and passive (but they're not obedient, not passive, not any of those things, because when Wylan looks at them he can see them float off the page, hear the melody wreathe around his longing ears), and they make sense to him, more than anything else. Words don't. Words are confusing and twisted, and there's no order, no neat system to them like music. They just sprawl out across pages, line after line after line after line after line, and they force into his head and sit there and wait, wait for him to make sense of them but he can't, he can't.
He plays the flute, but that's not enough- nothing's enough. He paints, too- or, well, he used to.
He hasn't painted since his mother died. He looks at the paints, and he sees them spilling across the cold floor in a swirl of colours, and he sees her lying in a pool of scarlet and he can't tell if it's paint or blood and God please let it be paint.
It wasn't paint.
It's not paint he's writing with now, which is a shame because he used to love stealing his mother's paints and brushes, trying write his name with the soft, fine tip. It never worked.
But now, instead of his name at the top of the page, there's a treble clef, and it's more beautiful than anything else Wylan could scrawl out with his shaky hand.
* * *
Nina is a slut. Or, she looks like one and that doesn't make sense to Nina, because she thinks that her clothes don't define who she is and who she sleeps with shouldn't have an affect on people's opinions of her, because it certainly didn't affect their opinion of who she'd slept with and she thinks it shouldn't matter but it does. High school thinks differently (society thinks differently), because girls are different, girls should be quiet but not too quiet, pretty but not too pretty, and fun but not too fun and she's so sick of it, so sick of this stereotype because she's not quiet, not quiet at all and she doesn't care how loud her opinions are because she has to be heard. They always drown her out in the end.
Her voice is lost under a mass of white noise, and she drowns with it. As she drowns, she dreams, but the water fills her lungs and suffocates her, drags her down and it's caught in her hair, weighing down her clothes and she wants to take them off but no, she can't because they won't let her. They don't like it.
Matthias liked it, liked it when she was bared for him, when her skin was the only thing between him and her and the night- but then, of course, her clothes came back on and he went away and she's never going to have him again. She can find solace in the company of other men, but she doesn't want to, and when she does she can't help but picture his hands instead, stroking her long, elegant curves, caressing the arch of her cheek, the swell of her breast, and when she cries out his name when she climaxes, she knows she deserves the blow that comes her way.
She closes her eyes, squeezing them shut until colours bloom beneath her eyelids (she loves the colours more than anything else, she thinks), but she still can't breathe so she clenches her hands even tighter around the pencil, holding on as if it's her anchor, as if she's full of helium and if she lets go she'll just float away, higher and higher into the hot, bright sky until she burns up and falls. But that's not right, because she feels so heavy, and she isn't full of helium, she's weighed with rocks and dragged down by stones she can't lift and she just can't, she isn't strong enough to lift them and she can't see the sunlight anymore, and God, she wants to see the sunlight, more than anything else.
The pencil shatters in her hands. She blinks, releasing the splinters of wood from her clenched fist, and looking back down at her assignment.
Her page is empty, spare for a few crossed out, half-finished sentences, and the brilliant droplets of scarlet blood scattering between the lines.
The corner of her mouth hitches up slightly, and she wonders if they carry lipstick in that shade.
* * *
Matthias is strong. He's muscle and fire and flesh and blood and bone- but not brains. At least, that's what they think. Matthias is smart, incredibly so, actually- but they never look past his muscle, never look past his status as quarterback, never look past his parents or his pride or his face. He doesn't expect them to.
He's large and burly and alone, and he wishes he wasn't. He wasn't alone a few months ago, because he had Nina- but Nina's gone now, and he doesn't know why. He lost her somehow, and it doesn't make sense because he doesn't know why she left, and God, he wishes he did. In fact, he wishes she hadn't left at all.
His eyes are ice blue, and in winter they feel even colder because ice isn't warm, isn't warm at all, and somehow it's caught in his eyes and he doesn't know how to get it out and it burns. His hair isn't warm either, it's not bright or brilliant, it's a blonde so pale it's almost silver, like the sun which has been bleached by the frost, the sun without fire, and he's so goddamn tired of being cold. Nina's warm, but Nina's gone.
He doesn't carve letters onto his paper; instead he inscribes short, quick pen strokes, hunching over his page as though he's scared someone will see (no one can see). He leans back in his chair to look at whatever he's drawn over the lined paper, examining it with a diligent focus for a few moments. It looks too familiar.
When he crosses it out, he's angry, angry and hurt and betrayed as he slashes black scars of biro over Nina's lovely face. When he looks down again, it's sliced and distorted with deep gouges of biro, a hollow echo of the finely carved drawing it had once been. He smiles.