prologue:
“Kaz. Kaz.” Varia muttered, looking around the abandoned alleyway. Her brother spared barely a moment to turn around from the ladder to shush her. Reluctantly, she followed him up the ladder and onto the roof.
Varia and Kaz Rietveld were new to the Barrel life, and had only recently joined the Dregs, Per Haskell’s gang. Although she was usually scared out of her mind in the Barrel, going on these missions with her brother usually eased Varia’s mind. She loved the feeling of being on a heist, and she knew her brother well enough to know that he had a plan for just about every situation they could get themselves into.
But tonight was different. The air was too calm, the waves on the shores of Ketterdam too quiet. And Varia couldn’t sense anything. Normally, she could tell if there were people awake in a building they intended to rob, or that there was an animal in a nearby wood they were hiding in. The ability didn’t make her Grisha, but she knew it wasn’t normal for her to be such a good tracker.
Now, though, she couldn’t track anything. It felt like there was something in the air suppressing her senses. The only thing she felt was panic. This is a trap, she thought.
Although Varia’s heart was pounding, Kaz looked at ease. He climbed the ladder until he reached the top, then held out his gloved hand to help her up.
The siblings always wore gloves after their brother Jordie had died. When Kaz and Jordie had been sick, Varia had somehow been healthy and had been used as help on the sick boat even though she was barely nine. The other boathands were much older than her, and they always told her how pretty she was and watched her work or even hugged her after she finished her shift. She hated hugging. She knew better than to talk to them, so she stayed with Kaz and Jordie most of the time.
Then Jordie had died. Kaz felt more anger towards Jakob Hertzoon than sadness of Jordie, but Varia felt melancholy. They both learned to despise human touch, so she and Kaz had obtained gloves and rarely took them off.
Now, as she and Kaz waited for a signal from the roof, Varia felt her sadness creep in. She pulled her gloves tighter on her hands and focused on her brother’s rambling.
“…and once we get papers, we get back to the Slat before ten bells,” he was saying.
That was all Varia heard before her focus jumped to a shadow behind Kaz, tall and silent, and it took her one moment too long to register that they were being ambushed. “Kaz, look out—” she shouted, but the shadow lunged forward and shoved her brother off of the roof.
“Kaz!” she screamed. The figure stepped toward her, but a shot of anger coursed through her, and she dived at them. She maneuvered a knife from its sheath and slashed blindly. She didn’t know where she’d hit, but she knew she’d met her mark when they released a yelp of pain.
Varia found the figure’s sleeve and made out a Dime Lions tattoo. Pekka Rollins’s gang, she realized. They must have been sent on the same mission she and Kaz were on.
She flung her hands against the figure and sent them sprawling off the roof as they’d done to Kaz. She climbed down the ladder as quickly as she could, and realized that there was no fear coursing through her. Just anticipation. Whatever act she’d just commited felt so much better than her usual nervousness.
When she reached the ground, she found Kaz leaning against the wall, alive but limping badly. He met her eyes and she saw the same anticipation gleaming in his eyes. His eyes were darker now, she noticed, more malicious. He looked at her arms and she realized there was blood spattered all over them.
“It…suits you,” Kaz said at last.
Varia barely acknowledged the compliment before she put her arm around Kaz’s and helped him limp home.
Looking back, Varia and Kaz remembered little else about that night other than that it was when they’d become true thugs of the Barrel.
They also remembered that it was when they officially became Kaz and Ria Brekker.
(word count: 722)
notes:
so this is my first fanfic and it's pretty much about Kaz's sister, if he had one! This is just a prologue, so it's pretty short, but I'm writing chapter one rn and I'll probably add it soon. But by no means will this have an upload schedule bc im too flakey for that (so it'll probs update whenever I have motivation to write a chapter) anyway i'm rambling but yeah fanfic!! oh and also this is when kaz breaks his leg and gets the crow cane, and also when he becomes kaz brekker bc i couldn't remember if they happened separately but they seemed cool to put together so yeah :]
chapter 1:
“Pekka Rollins. I should have known,” Kaz growled.
Pekka Rollins. The most infamous gang leader in the Barrel. Leader of the Dime Lions.
And now, as Ria and Kaz had just found out, Jakob Hertzoon the scam artist. The man who had led to Jordie’s death.
Although Ria knew she should be more righteous than she was being, she felt a hot spark of fury in her head. She and Kaz had been trying to find out who Jakob Hertzoon was and where he’d gone for four years, and their anger had been diffused at least a little bit as the years went by. But now that the villain had a face and a name, all of that feeling came right back to haunt them.
Jordie had been barely ten when he, Kaz, and Ria had fallen for Rollins’s scheme. Now that Ria was thirteen, the scheme seemed so obvious it pained her to think about how badly she and her siblings had fallen for it.
We think like tourists, Kaz had told her, but we need to think like thugs. Since Kaz’s fall off a building and Ria’s push of someone off a building, the two put that into action. They no longer thought of things in terms of what was theirs and what wasn’t. They thought of what was theirs and what they could make theirs.
Ria watched as Kaz peeled his gloves and wetted his hands through a leak in the room. The Slat gave Dregs a place to stay, but it was by no means glamorous. There were leaks everywhere, creaky floorboards in the places there even were floorboards, and a strange smell between the scent of jurda and soggy wood.
But for the meantime, it was home. Kaz and Ria had climbed the Dregs’ ranks rather quickly, and Per Haskell had soon asked them to become full members, tattoo and everything.
The tattoo wasn’t that bad; just a crow drinking out of an almost empty glass. And having a gang tattoo gave you credit around the Barrel, when otherwise you might be mistaken for a tourist and bribed into one of the gambling dens.
Ria was whisked away from her thoughts when Kaz shook his crow’s cane and put his gloves back on. The cane had been made by a fabrikator hiding out in Ketterdam and helped Kaz’s bad leg immensely.
“Where’re you off to?” she asked as he headed out the door.
“To find new recruits for the Dregs. You’d best be doing the same thing if you want Haskell to keep you here.”
Typical Kaz. He was always off doing something or other for old Haskell, acting like if he wasn’t helping the man every minute he’d be kicked out of the gang. For all Ria knew, that might be true, but it didn’t keep her from catching a break every once in a while.
Still, she followed her brother into the streets of Ketterdam. They split up quickly; both had learned to take care of themselves rather fast once they were amongst the company of thugs. Ria figured Kaz would head to the gambling dens in search of someone with a good sleight of hand, so she stayed in the streets. She had a distinct feel for somebody at the end of the road, possibly hiding in the shadows a couple hundred yards away. Over the past four years, her tracking senses had been refined and she could track over at least a mile of ground.
When she reached the end of the street, she found a track of boots heading into a gambling den. Ria knew her brother had likely already passed through the building, but her gut was telling her to go inside.
Everything inside was loud, particularly at one table. A broad, tattooed man was cornering a tall, lanky Zemeni boy who looked nearly Ria’s age. The Zemeni looked like a tourist, or a pidgeon, but if he were he would have been terrified. Instead, he held a smirk and seemed to be talking to the older man. Or maybe taunting him.
The man stepped closer and closer to the boy, and Ria was leaving the den when she heard a shot ring out. She turned around to see the tattooed man scrambling away from the boy, who was smiling at a hole in the wall, perfectly aimed through the center of a dart board.
Ria almost laughed. So this was who she’d been tracking after all.
The boy looked to be heading to leave the den, but Ria intercepted him before he could exit.
“Did you do that?” she asked, gesturing to the bullet hole.
The Zemeni chuckled. “Come to admire my skills, have you? Yes, I did indeed do that.” The boy held his hand out to shake, but Ria ignored it.
“My name is Ria Brekker,” she said, “That was pretty impressive.”
The boy looked intrigued, so Ria continued.
“Our gang could use a sharpshooter. What’s your name?”
“Jesper,” he said, “Jesper Fahey.”
“Well, Jesper Fahey, how would you like a job with the Dregs?”
(word count: 849)
notes:
OMG I LOVE THIS bc jesper and stuff
and also there was def a timeskip here from being nine years old to thirteen, but yknow. anyway next chapter comes whenever i end up writing itttt bye