Title Inspired by Hozier's Take Me To Church

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we are in love, not knowing how it all came to be

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TW: Religion and Sickness

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words: 1300

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There are seven thousand steps between him and that house, seven thousand painful paces to the house he wishes he could feel comfortable in, seven thousand, seven thousand. Counting keeps the moments running, keeps the world in tilt. One, two, three...till he's there and he tries and tries, sees the pity and the pity, and wants to scream for them to stop.

He clenches his jaw.

Maybe it's not their fault, maybe they can't notice that when they look at him like a dog to be threaded around, something deep within him shatters imperceptibly, barely noticeable to even him, but noticeable all the same. Shame twists and he wants to throw up his hands and give up, it's too hard, all too hard— he can't do this . Why is this so hard, why is drawing breath and pressing on so hard now? When had he become so alive?

He doesn't deserve them, any of them, dead or alive, and their pity, and their help, and their gentle reassurances, what shreds of their innocence they conjure up to not be cold and callous the way he is right back to them, yelling and screaming, his thoughts far too far away from his body which knows only violence and shuttered longing.

He lashes out and regrets it immediately, but when they don't get mad, and look at him with faux understanding, an unnamable feeling curls within him. They don't understand, they kept some scrap of living, some scrap of morality, where all he ever was in the before burned away leaving a husk of a man, the echo of a boy who hasn't existed for a decade. He wants to tell them all 'Go away, let me go, live, live, live, while you still can, you thrice-damned fools.'

He's nineteen (still a child to many countries ) when he burns with fever, and he is gripped with nothing but the bone-deep fear of the child that is curled into a ball beneath all that armour, and they brush cool cloths over his face, whispering words his shattered mind can't hold. They're all children, in the end, without guidance in a world for adults and kings and masters of old houses.

And when he can think again, he leans his head against good Jesper's shoulder, a thousand regrets and apologies on the tip of his silver tongue, where cruel whips and cold counsel normally lie in wait. He swallows them down with tears and bile, and Jesper is miraculously still, his knee pressed flush against Kaz.

Wylan's music drifts through the house, bouncing off the wood-panelled walls to his quiet nook in the house, silent with his fear. His lungs are eternally weak, and his vocal cords are damaged from his screams as the memories gripped him tightly in the peak of the fever. He is afraid to break the silence with so much as a cough, so he lies in fear, mind whirling with a decade of not living and not knowing and not understanding why it had to be him.

She arrives with Nina and the Fjerdan Nina plucked from the ice, in a flurry of knives and her long coat. He is much better now but still lives in silence, for fear that if he speaks, the world will remember he exists and he will be struck down once more, this time for good. She speaks for him, his reply his kisses against her brown knuckles, eyes searching for every scar and cursing every blade that marred her smooth skin.

On the seventh day after her return, he speaks again, in a voice quiet and scratchy from disuse. He speaks of nothing much, recounting business and the cons he's run. The stories of women who lounge in sunrooms spin about him, unaware of the spider spinning the web above them, the white of the spider's sharp grin.

Some are infatuated with him, some find him deplorable, and according to Roeder: some want him to do all manner of improper things to them. He had banned Roeder from his sight for a week after that tale, his confusion, fury, and the utter ridiculousness of the tail and Roeder's stupid grin as he told him that particular tidbit giving him a headache. In return to poor Roeder, he put him on a fourteen-hour watch all alone, and Roeder never told him the details of the foolish Merchant Women's infatuation with him again.

Inej, upon hearing that, had laughed in a way that sent Kaz's heart racing as he tried to scowl, his ears and cheeks peculiarly warm. "The only improper thing I'll ever do to them is rip out their hearts, perhaps," he said smoothly, as Inej began to tease him lightly for the foolish attraction the women held.

"Oh, but Kaz, don't you see? You already have, my love," his world stills, "Being mine. Those poor women have no...Kaz?" He meets her eyes, his head tilted to the side in silence, eyes wide and boyish.

"Being...yours?" He asks as if he cannot possibly fathom what those words even mean.

"Is there not something between us, Kaz?" She asks, something sharp in her tone. "It needs not a name, but am I not yours? Are you not mine? Will there not be a sweet innocence that we coddle in our hearts, or shall we dance around this?"

"Yes," he says, his breath far away as he looks into her dark eyes. To look upon such a fair face must be the gentlest sin he has ever committed, to make himself the object of her undivided affection the largest theft he has unknowingly committed. "There is."

She smiles, and he knows he is sinning so deeply when he captures her head in his hand, as she stills beneath the touch of his bare fingers. Two years, an odd seven hundred or so days lie behind them since the dock. Four years, nearly fifteen hundred days since she whispered four words and everything changed. The shock of progress fills the room as they lose sight of what they are and what they were for a moment.

He can feel her warmth from beneath his fingers as she feels the calloused but lovely skin on her face, tentative in their want. They both tremble with the words they leave unsaid, the weight of the others full attention upon them. The flowers blooming in their bodies, the warmth that fills them from head to toe.

"I..." he breathes, voice trembling on his exhale. His eyes dart around, his hands falling down, but she catches them in hers, and they hover between them. Finally, his eyes settle, and his voice is low as he speaks, "I want you."

Inej smiles, the bare skin against hers proof that times have changed since when he first told her those words. It's not the world, and there's still so many steps to go, many more he will return to when progress reminds him that it is not linear. But its touch, tethered and hot with wanting and need. Barely imagined and barely acknowledged thoughts fill them both, and suddenly the world is much sharper.

They breathe in tandem, leaving the desires unsaid for another day. All but one, pulsing and pounding between them and every stolen glance they have. It fills the room, and both of their eyes fall closed as the weight of how much they love settles between them.

"It's silly how we've fallen so," she says, "When I can't quite remember when it happened."

Neither knows who closes the distance first. But they do, and the world is lost around them, and they practically fly through the steps as they part and come together again, the taste of the unsaid on the other's lips.