Work Text:
Inej is still a bit giddy over the fact that she’s here with Nina after so long. It had been a bit of a shock to find her here, but Inej had recognized her old friend immediately, despite her vastly altered face. They’d left the party a while ago, and now the three of them--Inej, Nina, and Nina’s prince--are strolling down a quiet hallway, though the sounds of the coronation can be heard through the open windows, echoing across the courtyard. When she had first arrived, the opulence of the palace had made her stomach twist a bit. She’s never been the biggest fan of Ravkan royalty, and they’d never done much to try to exceed her low expectations. She has hopes that the new queen will make the welfare of the Suli people a priority, but even those hopes are couched in a quiet cynicism that Inej is sure she picked up from Kaz. She’d like to see results first before she throws her entire support behind the crown. Really, she’d only come to the coronation because such a large gathering of nobles presented too good an evidence-gathering opportunity to pass up. Statistically, someone here must be involved in the slave trade somehow.
The Saints must have brought her here for more than one reason, though, for she'd found a familiar person, if not a familiar face. Now, as she walks through the hallway with her arm looped through Nina’s, she barely notices her surroundings at all. Not very Wraith-like, but she supposes she can take a night off. Nina has been talking her ear off the whole time, explaining the change in her appearance, and her new identity. She had introduced Inej to Prince Rasmus, who had smiled politely and said it was nice to meet her. The rest of the time he has spent watching Nina fondly out of the corner of his eye. Now, as they reach the door to one of the guest suites, which Nina opens to usher them inside, he places his hands behind his back and gives a short bow. “Well, you two have fun. I should be off.”
Nina halts in the middle of a sentence and looks at him bemusedly. “You’re not coming in?”
“You two should have some time to catch up alone. Also, it wouldn’t be proper for me to enter your chambers, given our engagement hasn’t even been made official.”
Nina gives him a saucy look that nearly makes Inej blush. “You know I’m not one for propriety.”
The prince loses his battle with a blush of his own, and Inej is painfully reminded of the way Matthias used to react to Nina’s incessant innuendos. She then berates herself for the connection. It isn’t fair to compare the prince to Matthias. Nina deserves her happiness, and if blushing, overly-proper Fjerdans are her type, who is Inej to judge? “Still,” the prince says, coughing a little to try to recover, “I’m sure you have a lot to talk about, and I don’t want to intrude. I’ve got work to do anyway.” Nina acquiesces, and Rasmus turns to Inej, “It was a pleasure to meet you, Captain Ghafa.”
Inej preens a bit at the title. “It was an honor to meet you as well, Your Highness.” She performs her best approximation of a curtsy, dressed as she is in a long frock coat and breeches, and the prince nods in response, looking a bit uncomfortable. He squeezes Nina’s hand and turns to go, but before he can Nina draws him back in and plants a lingering kiss on his mouth. When she draws back, he stammers a goodbye and retreats down the hall toward his own chambers.
“Still flummoxing Fjerdans on your days off, I see,” Inej says, settling herself down in an overstuffed armchair in front of a fire that is already roaring.
Nina cackles and throws herself onto the chaise lounge opposite Inej with all the grace of a felled tree. “It’s my day job now, actually. I’ve been promoted since you last saw me at it.”
Inej laughs, and they settle into a moment of silence, both staring into the fire, and both, no doubt, thinking of Matthias. “I’m glad you’ve found happiness again, Nina.”
Nina smiles, but her eyes look a bit misty. “Thank you. And I am. Happy, I mean. After...after Matthias, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be again.”
Inej may not know the exact feeling, but she thinks she understands an approximation of it. After the Menagerie, she’d thought the part of herself that loved freely and hoped relentlessly was gone. But over the nearly four years since she walked out of the Menagerie, those parts of the girl she was had been awakened in the woman she’d become. “He seems nice,” she says in the silence. “A bit reserved, but I’m sure you can fix that.”
Nina laughs again and throws herself up off the chaise. She crosses to the table, where a bottle of wine has been chilling in a bucket of ice. She fills two glasses nearly to the brim and brings them over. Inej raises an eyebrow at the amount of wine in the glass, but Nina just winks. “We never got the chance to get astoundingly drunk and toast our success at the most insane heist ever, what with you getting kidnapped and me in the throes of addiction. I’m making up for lost time.” She settles herself more carefully on the chaise this time, now that she has a drink to worry about. She scrutinizes Inej head to toe, then says, “The pirate life suits you.”
Inej recognizes the opening for what it is. She begins regaling Nina with her tales at sea, telling her about boarding slaver ships, taking the captains hostage and bringing them to Ketterdam to face justice. She mentions the increasingly creative ways she has been drawing attention to these sorry excuses for men. Nina chokes on a mouthful of wine when Inej tells her about her recent foray into tarring and feathering. Once she’s caught her breath enough, she applauds melodramatically and proclaims, “I knew we’d give you a taste for theatrics eventually!”
Inej laughs and raises her glass to her lips, surprised to find it’s empty. Not to worry, though, as Nina is there immediately to fill it. “That’s not the best part, though Nina,” she says solemnly. “The best part is getting to return those people to their homes and their families. The joy on their faces. Knowing I’ve saved them from the kind of fate I suffered. That the world won’t have a chance to break them the way it broke me. It makes all the hard parts worth it. I think that’s really why I don’t kill the slavers if I can help it. I want them to know they failed. I want them to live the rest of their puny, miserable excuses for lives condemned to chains the way they were trying to condemn those innocent people.”
“Wouldn’t it feel better to kill them?” Nina asks with the kind of drunken seriousness that is only achieved after midnight.
“No,” Inej says with a certainty she didn’t know she felt until now. “Killing them would be too easy. I want them to suffer.”
“Good,” Nina says with finality.
The evening pours out before them as the wine is poured into their glasses. Nina tells Inej how it took her six months to find the strength to bury Matthias in the cold Fjerdan ground. They both shed tears, but then begin to reminisce about the brief time they knew him. From there, the conversation starts to turn lighter. Inej isn’t quite sure how, but they’ve both abandoned their seats and are now lying on the floor together, Inej’s head cushioned on Nina’s stomach. Inej’s head bounces up and down in time with Nina’s laughter as she regales her with Jesper and Wylan’s recent exploits in house training a stray dog they had rescued from a canal.
“Saints, the image of some mutt pissing all over Jan Van Eck’s stuffy furniture is just what I need to be able to get me through all the boring meetings I’ll be forced to attend in the coming days.” Nina sighs contentedly, then breaks into another round of giggles.
They lay there in silence for a bit, and Inej is trying to drink up the dregs of her third (fourth?) glass of wine without spilling on herself, when suddenly, Nina pushes herself onto her elbows, jostling Inej’s arm. A few drops of red wine are soaking into the collar of Inej’s fine white shirt, but she can’t really bring herself to care. She readjusts herself so she’s also balanced on her own elbows, watching Nina clearly trying to push through the wine fog to say something important. “Okay,” Nina says, then pauses to remove strands of her own hair from her mouth. “Okay, we’ve talked about me, and you, and Jesper, and Wylan, and even Kuwei. I’m sufficiently drunk, so I'm ready to hear about the Prince of Darkness. Has he fixed that haircut yet?”
“That’s what you want to know?” Inej snorts.
“Inej,” Nina’s tone is suddenly very serious. “He’s gotten a new haircut, hasn’t he? Please tell me you aren’t sucking face with someone who looks like he was attacked by a toddler with scissors.”
Inej flushes. “It does not look like he was attacked by a toddler with scissors.”
“Inej!” Nina groans. “Have a little self-respect, please.”
Inej throws one of the pillows that had fallen off the chaise at her. In her drunkenness, her usual aim is off. “It’s not that bad!” she insists, but Nina just levels her with a surprisingly sober stare. She relents, “Okay, it’s not great, but I don’t know, I think it’s kind of cute.”
“That’s disgusting, tell me more.”
“More what?”
“You, Inej Ghafa, Keeper of Secrets, just said you think Kaz Brekker is cute. And you only blushed a little. That’s progress! I want to hear everything.”
Inej blushes deeper. The wine has loosened her tongue. If it ever got back to Kaz that she called him cute….he’d probably cross his arms and narrow his eyes at her and insist that he is absolutely not cute, and honestly, Inej thinks, that would probably be pretty cute in itself. Maybe she should tell him herself. Oh, Nina is still waiting for an answer. She can’t seem to pull any coherent thoughts out of the wine fog in her brain. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Okay, fine, I can make it an interrogation. First let me prepare myself for the answer” Nina says, and places a hand against her forehead. Then she says quickly, with the air of someone getting something unpleasant out in the open, “Is he a good kisser?” She winces as she says it and scrunches her eyes like she’s just had too much of a cold drink too fast.
Inej chokes a bit on the wine she’d been taking a sip of (when had her glass refilled itself?). She has to cough a bit to get her breathing under control again. “I...we...he’s...it’s nice,” she finishes lamely. In truth, she can count the number of times she and Kaz have kissed on one hand. The first time had been an unmitigated disaster, and they’d decided not to try again for a while. But the last time she was in the city, they’d given it another go, and no one had thrown up, or panicked at all. Progress.
Nina raises a knowing eyebrow, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing?”
“It's not that…” Inej says unconvincingly. While it is true that Kaz is incredibly inexperienced in that department, the issues run a lot deeper for both of them than a simple lack of practice. But she doesn't want to get into all that here.
Nina takes one look at her expression and throws her head back, cackling loudly. “I always knew the little bastard was a virgin.”
“Hey,” Inej says, pushing Nina gently with her foot. Although there’s nothing false in Nina’s statement, Kaz had told Inej the whole truth about Jordie and the Reaper’s Barge after their disaster of a first kiss, and she doesn’t take kindly to anyone making fun of him for something he can’t help.
Nina registers her tone and dials down the laughter. “Sorry, I know you love him. I shouldn’t make fun.”
I know you love him. Saints, is she that obvious?
“If you’re wondering if you’re that obvious, the answer is yes,” Nina says flatly.
Inej flushes again. She must be the color of the Corporalki keftas by now.
Nina smiles softly at her. “I can’t say I understand your taste, but I’m glad you’re happy. You are happy, right?”
“Yes,” Inej says without hesitation. “I know it might not make sense to you, but the pace we’re moving at works for both of us. We both have a lot of issues to work through.”
“Kaz? Issues? You don’t say.”
Inej pushes Nina with her foot again, more playfully this time. She lays flat on her back and stares up at the intricate designs on the ceiling. “Look at us, in the Ravkan Palace, drunk on the king’s wine, talking about boys. Who would have thought?”
“I think it’s technically the queen’s wine now. But I know what you mean.”
“We’ve come so far from the broken girls we were, clinging to survival on the dirty Ketterdam streets.”
“And look at us now. Me with my prince, you with your canal-dwelling gremlin. Fairytale endings all around.”
Inej sits up, her head spinning a bit with the drink, and holds out her hand for Nina to join her. She rests her head on her friend's shoulder, feeling a wholeness in her heart she hadn’t realized was missing. “Let’s never again let two years go by without seeing each other.”
“Never,” Nina agrees. “Not to worry, though, we’ll see each other soon. You’ll be at my wedding won’t you?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Can I bring a date?”
“Only if you take him to a barber first.”
They both laugh, and as the night hurdles inevitably toward morning, Inej takes a moment to thank her Saints for good wine and better company.