Chapter Text
Keeping secrets, Wylan knew, was not simply a matter of endlessly bottling them up. It was basic physics—every vessel had a finite capacity for how much volume it could hold before it was compromised beyond repair. And secrets were volatile substances prone to expansion in containment. They demanded room to breathe.
The real trick was in creating a system at dynamic equilibrium, wherein the inflow was offset by the outflow. Under ideal circumstances, the two rates would be equal and the system would be stable.
In the Van Eck manor, ideal circumstances were a pipe dream.
In the Van Eck manor, Wylan was lucky if he could manage any outflow at all.
The first time he’d done it, he’d been eight, fresh on the heels of his mother’s death. His hands and knees had been rubbed raw from crawling across his father’s study, made to organize papers he could not read. “Prove to me you’re better than the strays that chase after scraps on the street,” his father had demanded. “Then I’ll allow you to walk like a dignified boy back to your room to rest.”
Wylan had crawled until the carpet had been streaked with blood, after which his father had made him stop because he had better people to pay than rug cleaners.
He’d sat there in his room, wincing as he shifted his weight around—trying to appease the bones that ached to stretch while simultaneously preventing his broken skin from rubbing against the fabric of his bedsheet, wishing and wishing for the pain to stop.
And something in him must have heard those silent pleas because when he looked back down at his hands, the skin was pink and no longer a patchwork of pain as it had just been. It wasn’t all of his injuries—barely a fraction of them, just the cuts on his palms and the smallest scratches on the knee that his right hand had been cradling—but it was enough of a change that he could tell the difference.
At eight years old, Wylan knew that wishing didn’t create power, didn’t heal wounds. The small science, though—that was another story.
What would they say, his father’s voice whispered in his mind, if they learned you were a Healer after your mother’s passing? Can you imagine how disgraceful that would be?
He told no one.
Wylan knew from his mother that his grandfather—her father, not the man whose visage loomed over their dining room—had been Grisha, an Alkemi. Given the Kaelish attitude toward Grisha, he’d been made to hide his power growing up, and by doing so, drove himself to the brink of debilitation. When he’d moved his family to Kerch, he’d established the Hendriks name on the island enough for Wylan’s mother to secure a marriage with his father, but he’d never truly been able to enjoy the fruits of his labor, always on and off bedrest.
Though Wylan already doubted he’d ever get the chance to control his family’s fortune even without those complications, he figured there was something to be said about not repeating past mistakes.
That still left him with a problem, though: exercising his power required injuries to heal, injuries he couldn’t afford his father or any of the staff ever noticing having disappeared. Already, he was fretting about someone realizing that his knee didn’t look bad enough to have left the amount of blood it had on the floor of his father’s study.
If Wylan wanted to ensure no one ever suspected him of being a Healer, he needed injuries that no one else would ever know about. And the only way to that, he realized, his gaze stooping to his own trembling hands—
The only way to do that was to create them himself.
It was frighteningly easy in retrospect. A slip of his finger against a fresh sheet of parchment in his bedroom. A too-hard scratch across the length of his calf in the bath. One time, he’d genuinely made a mistake and dropped an empty flask during a chemistry lesson, and on impulse, he’d pocketed one of the glass shards to slice his thigh, later.
There was almost a rhythm to the repetition: the disinfecting, then the cut, then the healing. He got used to the sting, the pain; when wasn’t he in some sort of pain, anyway? It was practically part of his natural state of being at this point.
The hard part of keeping the secret was knowing every moment was a crossroad with a toll to pay. It was easy enough when it was just him who was hurt, but it was doubly difficult when it was someone else.
When he was ten, his father’s screaming frightened his new nanny so much that she tripped over her feet trying to stand and hit her head on the table. He’d heard her gasp as the thud rang out, seen the blood seep through straw-gold strands of hair—there was so much blood.
It wasn’t on his hands, but he could feel it, the way it oozed out of the wound, the way the walls of her blood vessels were broken, frayed like yarn, even, the tissue throbbing and growing warmer and warmer, and—
Wylan stared at the woman, his hands twitching limply at his sides. If he took a step forward, he could reach her. If he reached her, he could heal her.
If he healed her, his father would know. If his father knew—
“Don’t just stand there, boy!” his father barked, and instead of running to her side, he bolted for the door, calling for the head of the waitstaff to fetch a Healer.
He didn’t dare ask what had happened to her when he had a new nanny the following week.
When performing an experiment, there were two main reasons the scientist might not get the right results. The first was a blunder, a human mistake like forgetting a step or measuring a chemical incorrectly.
The second was an error caused either by a flawed experiment design or a systemic fluctuation; put simply, it was something that could happen even when the instructions were followed to a tee, even when all reasonable precautions were taken. It was something beyond the scientist’s control.
Wylan wondered whether it was a blunder on his part or an error that caught up to him on the boat to—well, he supposed it was likely never bound for Belendt, was it?
His neck throbbed where Prior’s hands had been, but by the time he hauled himself out of the canal, shivering and skin slick with a putrid sort of slime, he feared trying to heal himself would end with him unconscious in an alleyway.
Though, frankly, that seemed a likely scenario regardless.
When he’d been younger, he’d briefly considered what he might do if he ran away. He was weak, and his illiteracy did him no favors, but Healers were always a valued commodity. It wouldn’t be hard to find someone willing to feed him in exchange for the work of his hands, but Wylan had seen how the Grisha indentures of merchers were treated; “commodity” was the right word. There was no freedom in a Healer’s contract.
The freedom the alternative offered was paltry at best, but Wylan pleaded his way into a job at the tannery, nevertheless. It wasn’t much less exploitative in the long run, but he supposed it was better than starving.
He knew, on some level, that it was only a temporary measure, a few drops of buffer in a vast vat of solution; it was only a matter of time before the inevitable came to pass.
Wylan couldn’t decide whether sleeping with Jesper Fahey was a blunder or an inevitability.
It certainly hadn’t felt like a mistake when his tongue had been in Wylan’s mouth, a lingering hint of sweetness from the stroopwafels Wylan had bought instead of saving for something more practical. It hadn’t felt like a mistake when his hands had slid down the length of his torso, when those fingers pried off his sweat-stuck undershirt and—
There had been a moment, just after Jesper and his dextrous hands had rid Wylan of his garments, when the man had paused for the briefest of moments.
Wylan had known it was because of the scars, mementos of a time before he knew how to heal himself enough to reduce scarring. Neat, parallel lines etched across the tops of his thighs, high enough that no one would ever see them if he were wearing any sort of clothing. He’d always been the sort of person who tended to develop slightly raised scars, so even in the low lighting, they stood out.
Wylan shifted uncomfortably under his stare, stammering out a “Sorry, should’ve warned you.”
“You’ve—you don’t have to apologize for that,” Jesper said, furrowing his brows. “Saints, I’m sorry for staring.” He paused, clearly wanting to say more but unsure how to continue.
Wylan swallowed, trying not to think about what Jesper must be assuming about him. What that might mean. “Ghezen, this isn’t how I imagined making you speechless,” he muttered, half-hysterical as he buried his face in his hands. “It’s fine, really,” he said after another second. “Those are old.”
Jesper nodded, eyes kind as he slowly settled a gentle hand on Wylan’s upper hip and said, “If you don’t mind me asking—and it’s fine, if you don’t want to tell a Saint’s-forsaken stranger—but do you still…” he trailed off.
“Not—no, it’s been a while,” he answered. It wasn’t entirely false, either. The scars Jesper was looking at were all old remnants of a time before he’d learned to heal without visible scarring. But, beyond that, he’d also not taken a blade or a shard of glass to his thighs in months because in the Barrel, he had no shortage of minor injuries to reckon with.
His learning curve at the tannery, though ameliorated by his understanding of chemistry, had been steep enough to land him with a few first degree burns and scrapes. He’d been shaken down for the little change he had more than once, even if they’d all eventually realized he wasn’t worth the effort of killing.
It was funny, Wylan mused, how the Barrel seemed better for him than the Geldstraat in this regard. Then again, the Geldstraat had never suited him much either. Maybe Wylan just didn’t know how it felt to belong somewhere at all.
“Thanks,” Jesper murmured, letting out a relieved exhale. His thumb rubbed circles over Wylan’s hipbone. “Are you still interested in continuing—”
This, at least, was something Wylan knew for sure: he’d wanted every moment he’d shared with Jesper that night. He just hadn’t been able to bring himself to face the consequences of wanting more than he was entitled to have, which was, of course, nothing.
The morning after walking out on Jesper Fahey, Wylan found himself replaying Jesper’s look of genuine concern after seeing his scars in his head.
Part of him couldn’t help feeling guilty about the exchange; after all, Jesper didn’t know the real reason behind those scars. He thought—he thought Wylan did that to himself for the sake of hurting himself.
He’d never—well, that had never been his primary motivation—
Really, Wylan had never needed to consider whether or not he wanted the pain he endured, never needed to think of it as anything but part of his cost of living.
Maybe, though, sometimes—
He didn’t let himself finish that thought.
Everything he did was for survival. Regardless of where his mind wandered on the darkest of nights, of how sometimes the singe of a new splash burn across his arm felt like freedom if only because his father would never know of its existence or disappearance, Wylan didn’t want to die.
That was enough.
Making bombs, Wylan learned, was an almost meditative process once he got over the whole ‘I’m making weapons for a gang and if it goes wrong, I’ll be murdered’ aspect of it.
He’d bargained his way into getting a proper workshop space from Brekker after pointing out that testing explosives in the basement of the tiny little boarding house he’d been renting would likely get him kicked out, so for the first time in ages, he could work without hearing the echo of heavy footsteps above him. Though he was certain Kaz still had some sort of surveillance on him—quietly, he wondered just how much he already knew—it still felt like the most privacy he’d had in ages.
Because part of him did suspect that someone was always watching his every move, Wylan had become more cautious about healing himself again. The tannery had taught him to be even more careful than he’d already been with handling chemicals, so it was rare for him to make any severe slip-ups, but he’d burned himself once by overestimating the ratio of phosphorus he’d used.
Stupid, he’d chastised himself, scrambling across the room for water to ease the stinging. Instead of healing himself immediately, he’d had the sense to dunk his hands in a bucket of cool water and wait a few minutes before his left hand ghosted over the tender parts of his right palm and took the edge off. Afterward, he’d still bandaged the hand and let it heal the rest of the way naturally.
Truly, the worst part of the ordeal had been wasting the phosphorus, he’d thought. A little pain was cheaper than a trip back to the marketplace.
Realizing Jesper had forgotten him was a different sort of pain than Wylan was used to.
“Oh, I guess I’m your demolitions man,” he told Jesper, fidgeting with a rag as he dried his hands against it.
Jesper raised an eyebrow at him, none of the warmth from their night together in his eyes as he said, “You? You’ve got all your fingers.” He reached for one of the flasks on the table, and to Wylan’s horror, opened it and lifted it to his nose.
This man was going to be the death of him, he moaned to himself.
“Well, maybe I’m careful,” he retorted, rushing to grab the flask from the other man.
Jesper gave him another disbelieving look. “Careful is something you learn from losing your fingers.” Wylan bit back a huff. Careful was also something one learned from hiding from a menacing father and his hitmen—not that he was about to tell Jesper that, given how little he seemed to care about Wylan revealing his vulnerabilities to him.
You’re the one who walked out on him, a voice in the back of his mind reminded him.
Wylan swallowed his disappointment as Kaz walked in. What did the past matter, anyway? In the end, what mattered most was his next meal and the assurance he wouldn’t get run through with a knife. The situation was messy enough as it was without those additional factors to worry about.
As if to rub in this fact, another woman strode in, announcing that she’d arrived with a Heartrender.
He didn’t know much about other Grisha, given that he’d never received any formal instruction on the small science. What he did know, however, was that the worst kind of Grisha to be around when one had a secret to keep was a Heartrender, and Wylan’s list of secrets was growing to be rather robust.
Instead of panicking about this, Wylan offered the room tea, hoping the brewing process would give him something else to distract him. No one took him up on it.
He wasn’t about to admit it to Jesper, but one time when he was nine, he had almost lost a finger.
He’d been sent to his room without supper for the second time that week, and his hands hadn’t stopped shaking since his father had screamed at him. He’d had the jittering in his veins again, though, the buzz of his power demanding to be used, else it would burn him from the inside out.
The sharpest thing he’d had in his room had been a pair of fabric shears accidentally left by a tailor from a fitting for some mercher’s upcoming birthday ball that he was required to make an appearance at. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to slice his finger deep enough to see bone with them, but he was sure that he’d dropped the shears soon after, ears ringing and vision swimming as he stared at the wound.
It was bad, he’d had the mind to realize, but his fear of his father kept him from crying out or calling for help. Instead, he’d poured his energy into fixing it, stitching the flesh back together, but he didn’t know what he was doing, and he could feel his blood rushing to the wound site, could hear his pulse thrumming in his ear like death drums and—
He’d managed to heal the skin shut, but he could still feel that the inside tissue was damaged, and though he was certain the blood was going to swell up on the inside with no escape, he still he didn’t dare ask for help because he’d messed up and now had an injury that made no sense without context of his powers. So Wylan whimpered into his shirt and used a scrap of fabric from an old sweater he never wore to tie off the base of the finger, hoping it would slow the bleeding, and then promptly passed out on his bedroom floor.
When he’d come to, he’d pricked himself with a needle to drain some of the blood. He’d forgotten to disinfect the needle, and with his luck, he’d wound up with a nasty infection that made his father begrudgingly call for a Healer. The silver lining, though, had been that the swelling of the infection had hidden the fact that there was an impossible cut beneath closed skin when the Healer had taken a look at him.
That encounter had allowed Wylan the chance to see a Healer work up close, which had helped him figure out how to hold his hands to properly channel the flow of power. But she’d told him, then, in no uncertain words, that he’d come close to almost losing his finger, between the loss of circulation and the infection.
Be more careful next time, she’d said.
Wylan tried his best.
Since Kaz had roped them all into his terrible, terrible mission by blowing up the Crow Club, Wylan hadn’t dared to use his abilities.
It was too dangerous. There were too many ways he could get caught, too many keen-eyed people in his vicinity for him to even think about getting away with it.
And so, despite the simmering in his veins, the constant inflow, he waited.
Wylan realized he’d messed up arriving early to Kaz’s meeting spot when Nina slid into the seat next to him and started a conversation with “Has anyone ever told you your heart rate is abnormally fast?”
This comment had not been good for said heart, Wylan thought faintly as he shook his head. “No, but I can’t exactly say I’ve seen a doctor recently,” he’d chuckled awkwardly. It was the first time he’d ever wished to see Kaz Brekker appear, just so the attention would be taken off him.
Nina made a noise of acknowledgment. “No, I don’t suppose you have,” she agreed, looking him up and down. “Really, though, your heart’s always going like a hummingbird. I don’t know how you work with explosives without it giving up on you.”
“Working with chemicals doesn’t really get me nervous,” he admitted. “I mean, it’s easy enough once you know what they are.”
Reactions were predictable. Wylan knew how to manipulate them, even without reading a procedure off a page. But people—people were impossible to predict. Wylan wasn’t good enough at reading them for that.
She huffed a small laugh. “See, that—” she made a small pointing gesture at him, “—is why you’re the demo man and I’m not. I’ll take the small sciences over your one any day.”
To be honest, Wylan wasn’t the fondest of either—he was good at it, but if he had his way, he’d spend more of his days learning music and art. Currently, though, he couldn’t afford to pay rent without his chemistry skills, and he was already suffering from the consequences of ignoring his Grisha power. Part of the reason his heart rate had been so elevated these past few days was likely that he’d been fending off the urge to use it, and the stress had been worsening his already high baseline of anxiety.
It was like his blood was itching, somehow; there was a low but frenetic buzzing in his fingers that spiked every time he could feel an injury nearby. He only had a few bruises on himself at the moment, but with Nina next to him in the booth, he could feel a few scratches on her wrists and knees that his hands were twitching to deal with.
But he couldn’t, he reminded himself, so instead he forced a laugh. “I mean, I’d be a terrible Heartrender,” he settled on saying.
She hummed in agreement. “Best if we stay in our own lanes, I suppose.”
Biology had been Wylan’s worst science subject—there weren’t enough numbers for his taste—but his tutor had been kind enough to read aloud some of the textbook chapters on ecosystems to him when he was younger, and for some reason, that information had stuck with him.
“Every animal has a niche in the ecosystem,” he’d told Wylan. “An organism’s niche is defined as its unique role and position in the ecosystem, which includes its diet, behavioral patterns, and its overall impact on its surroundings. Having niches between creatures reduces the amount of competition in the ecosystem, and increases the biodiversity within the area.”
Within the team, Wylan knew what his niche was meant to be; he was there to make bombs, stay out of the way, and for the love of Ghezen, never mention that Jesper Fahey had fucked him within an inch of his life and forgotten it.
Fulfilling this niche was hindered by the fact that Jesper had decided to save his life by falling on top of him and remembering their one night stand in the middle of a shootout.
Ghezen.
“You bought me stroopwafels!” Jesper accused.
He sputtered. “You remember this now?”
And then, as if that hadn’t been enough to aggravate his already-tachycardic heart, he’d watched Jesper bend a metal pole with his bare hands and pretend it never happened.
Wylan’s education had not taught him the necessary number of swears to verbalize his feelings as he followed Jesper to the plague cemetery, wondering what the odds of there being two Grisha in hiding on one five person team.
Maybe we’re all secretly Grisha, he’d laughed to himself as they trudged down the path to Black Veil. Ghezen, Kaz may be a Healer too for all I know.
Wylan received confirmation that, no, Kaz was not also secretly a Healer, and that in fact, no one knew Wylan was one either when he and Jesper arrived at the cemetery.
He’d felt the wound before he’d seen Inej, wincing as Nina grit her teeth and moved her hands over her wound to no avail—he could tell she was trying to get the skin to knit back together, but was failing to also coax the muscle and blood vessels beneath the surface to play along, resulting in the whole wound stubbornly refusing to close.
Inej appeared half-conscious at this point, eyes slightly glazed; she seemed to be trying to keep herself from swaying, but even from a distance, Wylan could see that she was shaking.
“She’s losing too much blood,” Kaz stated, not even glancing over at Jesper and Wylan as they walked into the room.
Nina shot Kaz a withering glare. “I’m doing my best,” she snapped. “I’m not a Healer, and these aren’t exactly papercuts, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Kaz’s jaw tightened. “If she dies—”’
It was at this moment that it occurred to Wylan that if Kaz had been hiding his knowledge of a Healer’s existence within the team, this was when he’d reveal it. The fact that he hadn’t even looked at Wylan and continued fighting with Nina proved that Wylan had gotten away with it.
What would Kaz do, a voice in the back of his head whispered, if he learned you were a Healer after watching Inej bleed out in front of you?
Wylan didn’t know Inej well. He knew she and Kaz were—well, as close as any relationship involving Kaz Brekker could be—and that she moved like a ghost. Growing up in his father’s house, he’d developed a keen ear for signs of movement, out of fear of running into his father at the wrong time, or being walked in on while healing himself. And yet, Inej still crept up on him at the best of times.
The first time he’d met her, he’d wondered what had made her learn to move so silently. If, like him, it had been a who, rather than a what. He still didn’t know the answer to that, but there was always a quiet understanding that settled between them when she seemed to notice him flinching at loud footsteps and voices.
Kindness was in short supply in the Barrel, but Inej had always offered it to him when she could. And maybe—maybe that was enough incentive for him to step in. His hands twitched. One foot moved to drive him forward, cross the distance—
A hand landed on his shoulder. He froze as Jesper hissed in his ear, “Novice, I wouldn’t recommend going over there unless you want Kaz to bite your head off.”
Wylan’s heart was juddering in his chest. He didn’t want Inej to die, but the hand on his shoulder felt like a warning. There was hardly any weight behind it, and it was Jesper holding him back, but that didn’t matter to the adrenaline sparking through Wylan. How many times had his father pinned him in place with a single hand on his shoulder, just like this?
It didn’t matter how long Wylan had spent in the Barrel, he lamented. He was still under his father’s thumb.
Wylan watched from afar as Nina staunched the bleeding. After a minute—or longer, he couldn’t tell—Jesper pulled his hand away.
“Not good with blood, huh?” Jesper muttered to him. When Wylan shook his head numbly, he shook his head and said, “Remind me never to get stabbed around you, I guess.”
Yes, Wylan thought as he clasped his hands in front of him to keep them from shaking. That would be ideal.