She comes every night, but he never knows when it will be. She thinks it might be easier this way. So he can't feel the ticks of the clock drawing tighter toward when it will happen. But Kaz isn't a man who has ever known easy.

He's always awake the second she enters, and Inej isn't sure, perhaps, if he's simply always awake. She hopes not. He's earned his rest, this man who is chiseling a new face onto Ketterdam. Revealing its new shape in the negative image of the darkness he rips away. It's not gentle work, and he's not a gentle man. But he is brave.

It was him who began this. One new touch every day.

She suspects it takes him all twenty-four hours to work through the fallout of the last time and force his shuddering body to stillness again, to try for the next. And still, she knows he thirsts for it, in the back of his brilliant mind all day when he's running a thousand other calculations. She does, too.

He starts it, that day on the docks with his hands bare of gloves. That night, when she comes to his room with her eyes tender from tears and her cheeks tired from smiling, her body covered in the scent of her parents for the first time in her adult life.

"Than—" she starts to say and he stops her by stepping close. But he doesn't reach. Even now, he hates to be seen reaching for anything.

That first night, he moves in, his coat a blackness hanging from sharp shoulders. She stops breathing and his come short. She holds very still, in case.

He tips his chin down, watching her.

Only the Wraith could have caught the flick of the whites of his eyes, so fast is his glance toward the bed. And her throat knots and changes, her heart that had grown so big during that most perfect of all days...now it turns cold with the memory of years not as long gone as they should have been.

"I don't think," she says, "that I will ever do that again."

"I've never done it at all."

His voice is a rasp of roughness in the dark. Words gone so quickly she knows no one will ever hear them but her.

She knows that already, of course she does. She must. His gloves never come off. His body, she's only seen when it was slashed with blood and needing stitched back into itself. But somehow, hearing him say it changes something. His confession rises rises up through her, comforting her like the open air of the high wire. Like how balance can feel like gravity.

She steps closer, standing just inside his guard. The way he now stands within hers.

When she tips her face up, it fits perfectly within the curve of his neck, though they don't touch. His Adam's apple bobs once, sharply.

"I wouldn't know how to do it," she murmurs. "If it was just for me."

Pain slices through his eyes, and that's how she knows that he wants to give her that. Kaz is a man made of desire, driven by it. Animated by its need the way a puppet is animated by its strings. But she's never seen him want like this.

He says nothing, because of course he wouldn't. He'd never promise her anything he didn't have a plan to deliver. He might want her to have this: pleasure, for its own sake. Her body celebrated, not bought. But he's not a man who knows how to give that.

If he did, it would arrive like the ship. Like her parents. Unpromised, just appearing one day before her like a miracle wrought by her own personal sorcerer. One who could cross impossible walls and build fortunes and cities out of plagues and lies.

But these days, he can afford to give her more than he once could.

He dips his head, his cheekbone brushing against hers so quietly it's like the way she moves. So silkily between shadows no one's ever quite sure it happened. "Wait for me," he breathes. The letters barely given enough air to shape them.

It's the closest he's ever come to admitting how hard this is for him.

It's the closest he'll ever come, from his birth until the day of his death, to begging.

She says nothing, and she withdraws without a sound, without ceremony or wound.

She's back the next night.

#

Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters or this world, this is a thought experiment alone.