REAPER ─ kaz brekker

nine; might not make it til morning

009;                 MIGHT NOT MAKE IT TIL MORNING

THROUGHOUT HER LIFE, ONYX PRIDED HERSELF ON BEING A RATHER PATIENT INDIVIDUAL. 

It was required of her, for the job she worked and the life she was leading demanded a great deal of it. She learned patience stringing her first bow, or watching her father piece together the newest, most sophisticated parts of an arsenal waiting to be sold. She learned patience when that same bow string snapped back at her and left a nasty gash across her hand that wept with blood like tears from an eye. She learned it in the first time she stole the breath from a mans lungs as she strode down East Stave, only pausing briefly when the crowd stuttered to a fleeting halt.  

That man had been Pekka Rollins. And though at the time, consumed with grief and a thirst for vengeance, Onyx wanted nothing more than to watch him gasp and choke until he lay dead on the Stave, she allowed the air to return to his lungs and kept walking. It would've been easy, to let him die right then. It would have been so terribly, maliciously easy. But the man whose power saw to the death of her parents deserved a far worse fate than that. She smelt blood and smoke as she walked away that day. 

Onyx wished she would've had more patience at the present, as she helped Nina attempt to coax  melted rubber off of Inej's feet. Her special slippers had melted from the heat of the incinerator. Her shoulder dully throbbed as she pulled in a cold tendril of air and concentrated it more heavily around the soles of Inej's feet while Nina worked to pull the rubber away. They glimpsed up at one another and shared a brief, anxious look as the others approached from behind, leaving the tether and fashioned sling hanging from the embassy's roof. 

Nina adjusted Inej's feet in her lap. "I can't get all the rubber off her heels." 

Onyx eyed Kaz as he strode up with Jesper in toe. His shirt was covered in blood and his hair was far from unkept at this point. She worked her jaw. She wanted scream in frustration. Whatever it was that he'd done, whatever it was that he felt was oh so terribly important, Onyx surely hoped it was worth derailing their plan so heavily. That was unlikely though, considering who it was she was dealing with. 

"Help her," Kaz spoke, nodding to Inej. 

For a brief, fleeting moment, Onyx thought he was speaking to her, as if she wasn't crouched down, attempting to help already. But then she realized, with a halting start, that it was Jesper he was speaking to. Onyx's stomach twisted. 

"Me?" Jesper blinked, bewildered. "You don't mean--"

"Do it." 

Her mouth fell slightly agape as Jesper crawled across the roof to get a better look at Inej's feet. He settled up close to them and focused in on the rubber stuck to the soles of her feet, silently pulling the particles of rubber away from the main source. How did she not know? Well, perhaps the same way that only Kaz, Nina, and Inej had known about her being a Squaller. But it wasn't Jesper's job to know everything that went on within the twining, cobblestoned streets of Ketterdam. 

Onyx settled back against the glass dome they were using as shelter against the winds. "You're a Fabrikator?" 

Jesper glanced up at her briefly. "Would you believe me if I said no?" 

"Why didn't you ever tell me?" Nina asked. 

"You never asked?" 

"Jesper--"