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allmoshnobrain · 2 months

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𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

dave mustaine x nore burton (oc) | word count: 1514

✦ on this fic: NSFW!!!, dave mustaine x female!oc, oc is cliff burton's cousin, +18, language, romance, mxf sex, period sex (in the shower), unprotected sex, blood mention, period pains

✦ a/n: this is just Dave showering Nore with affection because I missed writing about these two in a happier setting. From my Heartbreaker fanfic. This is set somewhere between parts 16 and 17. Hope you enjoy the read ❤

I could tell right off the bat that something wasn't right when I cracked open my eyes.

For starters, it was way too dark for morning. A dull, gray light sneaked through the curtains, barely lighting up the room. Just enough for me to make out the shape of the living room door. I rolled over with a groan, and that's when it hit me: a stabbing pain in my gut, and a warm, sticky feeling between my legs.

"Oh, crap," I moaned, burying my face in the pillow as a sharp pain shot from my gut down to my legs, making me curl up tighter. As much as I wanted to cocoon myself in blankets, I knew I had to get up if I wanted any relief. With a heavy sigh, I dragged myself out of bed, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and trudging to the bathroom.

Flicking on the light, I shut the door behind me, letting out a frustrated groan when I spotted the bloodstain seeping through my underwear. I plopped down on the toilet, wincing as another wave of pain hit me. I knew a hot shower and some meds would help, but right now, I could barely move, my eyes drooping with exhaustion as the pain pulsed through me.

I jumped when I heard a knock on the door.

"Nore? You alright?" Dave's voice floated through, followed by a big yawn.

"I'm good," I mumbled, but my voice sounded weaker than I'd hoped. "Sorry for waking you."

"You sure you're okay?" His concern was palpable, snapping him awake instantly.

"Yeah, it's just... Ow," I winced as another contraction hit hard. That seemed to do it for Dave; he swung the door open and barged in, eyes wide as he scanned the bathroom. I flushed with embarrassment. "Dave!"

"Oh," he whispered, catching on as he saw me doubled over in pain on the toilet, my clothes in a messy heap on the floor, stained with blood. "I'm sorry, babe. You sounded like you were really hurting."

"I am hurting. But you didn't have to bust in here," I muttered, my face still red hot in embarrassment. He let out a soft chuckle.

"Have you taken anything for it? Want me to grab you some clean PJs? And socks, to warm your feet. You said that helps with cramps, right?" he asked, instantly slipping into caretaker mode, which made me smile.

"I'd rather you let me clean up and hit the shower first. But yeah, fresh PJs and painkillers would be great."

"Got it. I'll be quick. Don't move," he instructed, ducking out of the bathroom and shutting the door behind him. I let out a soft chuckle. Like I could go anywhere in this state. With a sigh, I got myself up, flushed the toilet, and stepped into the shower.

I leaned back, soaking up the steamy water as it washed over me, easing some of the pain pulsing from my belly. A shower, some meds, fresh clothes, and back to bed, preferably snuggled up with my boyfriend. Seemed like the perfect game plan for that early morning.

I cracked an eye open when I heard Dave tiptoeing back in.

"Brought you clean PJs, pain pills, and your towel," he announced, poking his head into the shower. I smiled softly, thankfully. "Want me to hop in?" he offered.

"What, you wanna join me?" I raised an eyebrow, and he shot back a cheeky grin. Without a word, he stripped down, and I couldn't help but giggle as he pulled me close, peppering my face with kisses – on my lips, my cheeks, my forehead.

"You know what I heard? Orgasms supposedly help with cramps," he whispered in my ear, and I could feel my cheeks heating up.

"Dave, I'm..." I started, but my words trailed off into a sigh as his fingers found their way to my clit. "D-Dave, I'm bleeding, we're gonna make a mess..."

"It's all good if we’re in the shower, right?" he countered, his voice low and husky, his breath warm against my neck. I let out a soft moan as he began to circle my clit, his other hand holding onto my lower back, pulling me closer as I tangled my fingers in his hair. His lips pressed against the sensitive skin of my neck, a slow and deliberate kiss that sent shivers down my spine. "Let me take care of you, babe…”

"Dave..." I breathed out, not in protest this time, but in pure pleasure as I surrendered to the warmth of his touch. The heat from the water and his body was soothing, mingling with the tension building in my abdomen as he traced slow circles around my clit. A moan escaped me as I felt a slow contraction, but this time it wasn't from pain; my breath hitched as his lips descended to my breasts, taking one of my nipples between his lips, teasing me with his slow movements. I let out a surprised gasp as he lifted one of my legs, pulling me closer as he entered me slowly. "Dave, I'm… I’m too sensitive today..."

"I'll take it slow," he whispered, and I let out a low moan as he drew me in closer, fully inside me, filling me up in a way that made me clench around him. He groaned softly, his lips meeting mine as he started to move with a gentle rhythm, his tongue exploring my mouth lazily. I wrapped my arms around his neck, letting out soft moans. "I just wanna make you feel good," he murmured against my lips, and I gasped as he pushed back in slowly. "Wanna make you cum for me."

"Oh, Dave..." I moaned, nuzzling into his neck. He grunted, holding me against the wall and lifting my other leg, wrapping it around his hip, pulling me closer, pushing deeper into me. I gripped his back, the pain ebbing away as pleasure took over, coiling tighter and tighter in my belly, my body begging for more. "Dave, please..."

"Hmm?" he murmured, a smirk playing on his lips as he started to move again, drawing out another soft moan from me. "What do you need?"

"Please... Oh, harder..." I begged, and he chuckled softly, a hint of breathlessness in his voice.

"Are you sure it won't make the pain worse?" he husked, his voice thick with desire, and I nodded. "If it's too much, you gotta tell me, okay?"

"Okay... Oh, fuck!" I gasped as he pushed harder, picking up the pace, sending waves of pleasure coursing through me. He chuckled softly, letting out a groan as he held me close. "Dave, I'm... I'm almost there..."

"I feel it. You're so tight..." he groaned, clutching me tighter, his words igniting small sparks inside my belly. "Fuck, Nore, you're perfect, you’re so wet, oh, shit..." I could tell he was close too, his movements growing more urgent as incoherent praises left his lips.

I moaned as he reached down to touch my clit, sending shivers down my spine. He grunted, intensifying his thrusts, and I held onto him, my eyes shut tight as pleasure surged through me. Dave squeezed me close as my climax hit, and he groaned as he reached his own peak.

Breathing heavily, I leaned against him as he set me down, blushing at the sight of the mess between us, a mix of blood and fluids.

"Oh, no," I muttered, cheeks burning. "Dave, I’m sorry..."

"Sorry? You just made me cum and now you're saying sorry?" he replied, sounding amused, and I chuckled, shaking my head.

"I meant for the mess," I clarified, and Dave laughed.

"Babe, we make messes every time we fuck, period or not. It's just blood. C'mere, I'll help you clean up."

After our shower, I got dressed, grateful for the fresh clothes, and popped one of the painkillers Dave brought, even though the cramps had eased a lot. Turns out, orgasms really did work wonders for period pains.

Snuggling under the blanket, I sighed happily as we lay down. Dave pulled me close, and I nestled my head on his chest.

"Feeling any better?" he whispered, running his fingers through my hair.

"Yeah, I am. Thanks, Dave," I mumbled, yawning. The room was getting brighter with the sunlight, but it was still too early to think about anything other than getting some more sleep in our comfy bed. Dave planted a soft kiss on my forehead.

"When we wake up, I'll whip up some hot chocolate for you. How's that sound?" he offered, and I let out a soft chuckle.

"You're spoiling me," I murmured, and he laughed.

"Of course I am. You're my everything," he replied, and I smiled, feeling sleep pulling me under. He held me close, his breath warm against my neck. "Love you, Nore."

"Hmm... Love you too," I whispered, feeling myself drift off.

I sighed happily, letting Dave's arms wrap around me as I surrendered to sleep, feeling safe and warm, knowing that happiness was right there: with him.

✧ if you'd like to be tagged, let me know and I'll add you to the tag list! ❤ ✧

tag list: @killazilla777 @whatsupvic @70srogah @genswine9 (tagged everyone from the regular story tag list for this extra content. hope you guys don't mind!)

#it's the way dave instantly barges into the bathroom as soon as he realizes nore's in pain 😭#i'm in a dave mood lately i needed to get this out of my system #waaaahhhh #ada writes fanfiction #heartbreaker fanfic #dave mustaine x oc #dave mustaine fanfiction #nore burton (oc)#megadeth x reader #dave mustaine x reader #megadeth smut #dave mustaine smut #megadeth fanfiction #megadeth x you #dave mustaine x you

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she-posts-nerdy-stuff · 6 months

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hey! i love your posts! i was wondering if you could possibly do an analysis on the infamous bathroom scene? why does kaz choose this time to get close to inej and help her with her bandages? do you think he went in with the intention to try and give her physical affection or did it just happen? why does he choose to kiss her neck and is there significance to that? no rush, but i’d love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks so much for your question! I know you said I rush but it really has been a long time so I’m so sorry this took forever, but let’s go!

So the bathroom scene begins very specifically parallel with one of the earliest scenes of Six of Crows, when Kaz is washing in his room at the Slat and Inej walks in to deliver him news, and I think this is supposed to give us a sense of finality. It increases the tension, because at this point the reader is very aware that not everyone is necessarily going to survive Kaz's plan and having this echo could therefore look something frighteningly like closure to prepare us for losing one or both of the pair. Now this can be interpreted as a red herring, Leigh Bardugo is the queen of hitting where the mark’s not looking and she feeds us a lot of red herrings to hide her actual foreshadowing (I made a post about it a while ago now but in summary she’s a genius), and this could definitely be an extension of that to draw attention away from Matthias, similarly to how she focuses on the possibility of Matthias losing Nina a lot more than she does Nina losing Matthias, or it could be a hark back to Inej looking at the murals of animals running in circles in Six of Crows, describing them as “destined to chase each other for as long as the Ice Court stood” (or along those lines sorry I don’t have my books with me at the minute) as a metaphor for her and Kaz’s relationship. I think that the cyclical nature of this scene is meant to reference that in order to suggest that actually they have found a way to break the cycle, because they succeeded at the Ice Court, they metaphorically brought it down and so the cycle is broken, and the fact that there are several distinct differences between these parallel scenes enhances that for me.

This scene is only given to us in detail from Kaz's POV, whereas the early scene is from Inej's, and in each case the opposite character is arguably in the more vulnerable appearing position. In the first scene Kaz is shirtless, washing blood off himself, and Inej is actively discomforted by the immodesty of the interaction between them. In the bathroom scene, Inej has removed her tunic and I believe is wearing a tank top, which for her is a massively vulnerable way to be seen because she covers most of her skin all the time - particularly her arms because of her scars from the removal of the Menagerie tattoo. By this point the scars has been removed by Nina when she was high on parem, but that doesn't make Inej's psychological connection to them end and it definitely doesn't decrease her feeling of vulnerability when her skin is on show. There's also the added tension of Inej being injured in this scene. Although both scenes are in the aftermath of danger, the bathroom scene has a far stronger sense of the further danger to come than the earlier one did, since at the time we knew so little of the heist and the plan. Inej's injury solidifies this and makes the danger feel constant and real, as well as intensely increasing her vulnerability in a way that she is very aware of.

The fact that Kaz chooses now to get close to her intensifies this sense of danger and makes the reader very aware that Kaz Brekker, the Bastard of the Barrel, the man we have witnessed successfully breaking in and out of the Ice Court, cutting out a man's eye, scaring a small child so badly she'll probably need therapy as an adult, murdering, thieving, and being so committed to his plans that he swallowed and regurgitated a set of lockpicks without a second thought, is actually, genuinely terrified that he won't come back from the next stage of his plan. In fact he's so terrified that he has decided to face the only other thing that frightens him, so that if he dies today at least he tried. I'm not sure if he went in with the intention of moving from helping her with the bandages to physical intimacy, because even the bandages alone would be a huge step for him. It's possible that once he'd committed to helping her with the bandages anyway, that he decided to push himself as far as possible in case he never got another chance. Possibly if he'd taken things in smaller steps he would have been able to cope with helping her today, and then know that he could help her again, and maybe one day after that he'll be able to kiss her. But one of the things that makes this moment so beautiful is that this is a snippet of time where Kaz and Inej are the only thing that exist, there is no future and if they try hard enough maybe there can be no past, maybe there can just be the present, there can just be this. Kaz takes these steps now becasue he doesn't see a chance to do it again, and although this does wonders to enhance the importance and the beauty of the scene it is also terrifying as a reader to face the very real possibility of Kaz not coming back.

I’m really glad you mentioned him kissing her neck because I do think it’s possibly symbolic and quite meaningful. Whilst both of them struggle with physical contact to different capacities, it’s important to note that whilst Kaz’s fear of contact has made intimacy a seeming impossibility for him, for Inej it’s intimacy itself that’s the biggest influence on her pain. She struggles with any contact she isn’t prepared for beforehand, but only ever finds it worth explaining when it’s a form of intimacy - “the first time Nina hugged me, I flinched”. Even though Inej consents in the scene and doesn’t, at least not vocally or physically and therefore not to the reader’s knowledge, change her mind, she never initiates anything. I think this is important because it forces Kaz to be the one who handles the initial contact; if she touched him skin-on-skin without him forcing himself to do so first then he probably would have shut down and panicked a lot sooner because he wasn’t in control. But he also shows such an important understanding that Inej also needs some level of control. And that control comes in her decision to return the kiss. If he kissed her lips she would be forced to face the prospect of her worst fear “would she kiss him back? Could she be herself in such a moment or […] a doll in his arms, a girl who would never quite be whole”. (Again, sorry, operating on memory alone for the quotes). By kissing her neck, Kaz is able to create this moment of sensuality without taking control of it any more than he needs to for his own sake, making sure that the choice always remains hers. It also makes me think of when Nina kisses Matthias on the neck whilst searching his pockets for parem, when she says that she didn’t kiss his lips because she would not let the drug take that from her. Leigh Bardugo establishes this kiss on the lips as something powerful early on in the book and it comes into play once again here, with Kaz and Inej acknowledging that kind of connection to be a far more symbolic one for them than an initial contact is. In much the same way that Kaz refused to be the one to mark Inej again, he will not be the one to kiss her lips and create a situation she is unprepared to deal with. Ultimately, he has to be able to touch her skin first, and she has to be able to kiss his lips first.

Ok I wasn't one hundred percent sure how I was going to go about this and then suddenly all of that was on the page, but I think what I'm going to do now is pick some specific quotes or moments from the scene to talk about.

"I don't have the words to thank you" "I'm sure the Suli have a thousand proverbs for such an occasion" "words have not been invented for such an occasion" "if I end up on the gallows you can say something nice over the corpse" - honestly not sure if I have anything to say about this I just love this conversation so damn much

"if that were true my shadow would have put Ketterdam in permananent night" "maybe. or maybe your someone else's shadow" "You mean Pekka" - I feel like I talk about Kaz being Pekka's shadow an awful lot but I am just so obsessed with the idea, they are literary foils but there are also such important distinct differences between them it’s just incredible

“I don’t sell girl into brothels, I don’t con helpless kids out if their money” “look at the floor of the crow club, Kaz,” - okay so of the same vein and again I feel like I talk about it a lot, in fact it’s literally what inspired the entire fic im writing (if you wanna read it all the chapters are tagged under “Maya Olsen oc”) but these lines are so goddamn heartbreaking I will never get over them

“How could she still look at the world that way?” - it’s just really interesting to me to have this direct address of comparison of the way their view has been shaped by their experiences, particularly as I’ve talked a lot about Inej having to come to terms with the idea that what happened to her isn’t just a cruel part of the world but an individual piece of a cruel world especially with seeing the “Rare Spices” billboard using hyper-sexualised Suli women to sell the products (I made a whole post on that too) and yet still she sees hope in the world. A lot of this I think is to do with her faith, because instead of believing that there can be no god or saints or other form of deity because of the cruelty in the world, as Kaz does (it’s confirmed that he prayed as a child but is obviously now very atheistic, though we don’t get a lot of detail about what religion he may or may not have practiced), a big part of Inej’s path to hell by is believing that fate planned this for her so that it would lead her to stopping it from happening to others. I struggle with this idea because it seems to imply that it makes her pain worthy of going through when obviously no-one should ever have to experience such trauma, but there are many different ways of interpreting this and personally I don’t think that Inej believes her Saints did this to her for a reason but that she believes they have found a reason for her to continue after after the fact and given her a cause in order to help her through her experiences. I hope this makes sense it’s starting to feel a bit ramble-y

Oh my god I just wrote loads after that and it didn’t save. Oh my god no I can’t believe it I’ve been writing for so long 😭 ok erm… oh god I’m so annoyed right now I can’t remember everything I wrote and it was so much like I’d nearly got to the end of the chapter doing a quote by quote analysis. Ok I’m going to try and reconstruct what I did but please bare with if this isn’t my best work because usually I write very freely when I do these and just throw whatever comes into my head into the page so cautiously trying to think back to what I said originally might make it come across a bit stilted.

I can’t believe I’ve done this 😭

“The distance between them felt like nothing. It felt like miles” - his internal conflict is so brilliantly written and it’s so heartbreaking; the way this is far too close but it’s much too far away

“Graceful as always. A girl underwater” - again this internal conflict, the way she’s underwater because her movements are fluid but she’s also underwater because to touch her it to drown

“His gloves lay discarded […] they looked like dead animals”

“Maybe he would never get to the Slat. Maybe this would kill him.”

“Inej’s eyes were wide and dark. Lost planets. Black moons” - I will never shut up about the fact that soc starts with Joost wishing Anya had blue eyes instead of brown so they were easier to compliment, and then the two books are absolutely overflowing with Kaz and Inej describing each other’s beautiful brown eyes

“It’s shame that eats men whole. He was drowning it. Drowning in the Ketterdam harbour”

“Even now a boy will smile at me on the street, or Jesper will put his arm around my waist, and I feel I’m going to vanish,” - this is such and important moment, this scene is the most vulnerable and open Inej ever is out loud and I think it’s such a massive concession to her trust in Kaz. I think that, especially because the scene is written from Kaz’s perspective, we get a lot more emphasis on his struggle than on Inej’s and although it’s really important to discuss Kaz I do think that sometimes we tread a thin line of focusing on him at the expense of losing focus on Inej and it’s so massively important to acknowledge both of them. This is also one of the things that I think was the biggest downfall of the way the writing in shadow and bone season 2 treated Inej, although I absolutely adore the show and I think that everything Amita Suman does shows that she understands the character in a deep and beautiful level, I also think it’s so so important to realise that not once in either season does that script actually state that the Menagerie is a brothel. One of my friends who hasn’t read the books didn’t get the full picture of Inej’s backstory until I filled in some small gaps for her because the writing just didn’t do her full justice, and I think that’s really unfortunate not least because it means that to some who hasn’t read the books a lot of Inej’s actions in season 2 would come across as her trying rush Kaz into something he isn’t ready for when that isn’t the situation in the slightest

“The room tilted. He clung to the tether of her voice” - I’ve seen a lot of stuff online about the focus points of contact between grishaverse couples and the way their represented, for example with Malina it’s their hands (the way they hold hands as Alina is grabbed by Volcra and it amplifies her power, the way they reach to intertwine their fingers in the meadow, etc). And most of these label the eyes as Kanej’s focal point of contact, and whilst I agree with that I also think that the voice is a massively underrepresented one, especially from Kaz’s perspective. It’s Inej’s voice that helps him work through his panic attack in soc and it’s Inej’s voice that keeps him afloat now, arguably because it’s a form of connection between them that requires no closeness or input, it just exists and can be relied upon.

“I live in fear that I’ll see one of her… one of my clients on the street. For a long time I thought I recognised them everywhere. But sometimes I think what they did to me wasn’t the worst of it” - okay I want to warn you guys now I wrote a long and in depth analysis on this quote and I was incredibly passionate and very proud of it so I’n really really annoyed it didn’t save, and I’m sorry because my analysis now is probably not going to live up to what I wrote earlier but here we go:

For me, this is a massively important quote and there are two ways to read it. Firstly, that when she refers to “her” Inej means Heleen but edits her words as a continuation of this vulnerability she is forcing herself to share. The second is going to link to something I said a while ago about how we could compare a separation of “Inej” and “The Wraith” to the separation of “Kaz” and “Dirtyhands”, but this is a bit more like the separation of “Rietveld” and “Brekker”. Inej talks a lot about how she would leave her body behind to exist only in her mind, in passages I find particularly reminiscent of passages in The Handmaid’s Tale (although please note soc is not very explicit whereas tht is incredibly explicit). But to take that idea further, I think there are certain hints, and I think this is possibly the biggest one, to imply that one of Inej’s ptsd responses it to actually view herself today as a separate entity from who she was during her indenture, effectively saying ‘yes these things happened to this body but they didn’t happen to this mind so that should make it easier’ to herself, which is massively self-destructive in nature because it almost creates this idea that she needs to get over who she once was and move on, very similar to the way Kaz Brekker represses Kaz Rietveld. Arguably, what she’s saying is the worst of it is this fracturing of the self that has been created by what they put her through and that she cannot seem to escape from. Now obviously I don’t know the intent behind Leigh Bardugo’s words and I want to be very clear that there are different possible interpretations of this, this one in particular does happen to more darkly resonate with her ptsd that does not make it correct or incorrect but I think it’s worth considering, especially when it adds another layer to the parallels between her and Kaz.

Ok I’m not going to write out the full quote because it’s quite long but starting from the line “Tante Heleen wasn’t always cruel” - now I talked about this a bit in my post about a comparison between Inej and Wylan as subsequent to a comparison between Heleen and Van Eck, but very specifically in this passage Inej describes this horrifying, heart-shattering image of the way Heleen attempted to instil something akin to Stockholm Syndrome within the girls at the Menagerie, by forcing them to believe that she was their only hope for survival, that she was kinder to them than anyone else would be, that they had to prove they deserved to stay with her, that any abuse she brought down on them came from a place of some kind of twisted love or care because she had to do this to make them understand, that if they would just be good and if they would just understand then she wouldn’t have to hurt them but they won’t do they are forcing her to do this. It’s so painful and it tells us so much detail about Inej’s experience without actually going into tiny explicit details.

“Feeling regret and release as he broke contact with her skin” - again so brilliantly highlighting his internal conflict

“He could feel the warmth of her on his fingers like fever” - if I had a list of my favourite similes in literature… well it would be very long, but this would be on it!!! The subtlety and yet emphasis on Kaz’s internal conflict is so beautifully written here, with the warmth of her flesh against his creating this sensual atmosphere but the comparison of it to fever, to the illness that killed Jordie and took Kaz to the Reaper’s Barge, adds to the way the reminder of his pain is threaded through every moment even when he isn’t physically suffering a flashback, it’s just constantly present and inescapable

“That rapid pulse fluttering in her throat. Alive. Alive. Alive” - agaiiiiiiiiiiiin with the so brilliantly written internal conflict I will never get over. The entire scene is at war with itself, every sentence at odds with its own content. The sexual tension created in the image of the fast heart rate and the way this makes you feel alive versus the desperate need to keep reminding himself that she is alive and breathing she is not a body on the Reaper’s Barge.

Ohhhhh just the whole description of Kaz saying “after all she’d endured, he was the weak one” and explaining the pain of watching the others able to hold each other, how difficult it is to see Nina hug her and Jesper out his arm around her genuinely makes me want to cry, it resonates so sadly with the scene when they arrive at the Geldrenner and all the others are hugging and so happy to see each other alive, and Nina says that even if Kaz isn’t happy to see them they’re happy to see him, meanwhile Kaz is in a war of self loathing because he so intensely fears that they hate him because they think he hates them but he has no way of expressing himself and it’s just ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, you know?

“He watched that pulse, the evidence of her heart”

The whole passage that follows this moment I can’t explain it any other way than I feel like I’m melting every time I read it. I saw a Tumblr post someone had put on Pinterest recently and if I find it again I’ll put the op username in the comments but it basically said that when a writer can write something that isn’t a sex scene as if it’s a sex scene that it’s kind of magical and I think in a lot of ways this resonates massively with this scene

Ugh and then I want to cry again when he can’t cope and the I ability to express himself becomes anger and becomes descriptions of violence. This is the only time we get a full feel for the absolute unending mess of Kaz’s theist for revenge; it’s never enough, not the banks, not the attorneys, not the man from the cafe, not the boy who lured them in, not Margit, not Saskia, and Pekka Rollins won’t be. I always wonder if it’s important that we’re never told what he did to Saskia. We know that the roper was tortured and left dead with “the key to a wind up dog shoved down his throat” so we know Kaz exercises some kind of poetic justice in his violence, and we see that in his revenge against Rollins too. Maybe he strangled her with a red hair ribbon. Maybe he never actually hurt her. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to.

“You don’t ask for forgiveness Kaz. You earn it,” “and is that what you intend to do? By hunting slavers?” “By hunting slavers” - maybe it’s just because of the intonation choice on my audiobook (which btw is awesome shout out to the narrators of the audiobook love you guys) but this to me comes across as Kaz attempting to mock Inej in his harried, terrified, clearly losing control state and her so calmly standing her ground and standing by what she believes in

“His eyes scanned her face […] snatching at the pieces of her like the thief he was”

“But if he was going to die today maybe the one thing he’d earned was the memory of her, brighter than anything he would ever have a right to, to take with him to the other side.”

The way the last moments of the scene include him putting back in the gloves, reconstructing the armour

“He might as well go to meet his death in style” - this is gonna be out of tune with everything else I’ve said but damn what an icon love this line

“Whatever happens to me, survive this city. Get your ship, have your vengeance, carve your name into their bones, but survive this mess I’ve gotten us into.” - I may simply ✨cease to exist✨. But genuinely I’ve mentioned several times before about how the city of Ketterdam almost becomes it’s own character as the antagonist because ultimately it’s the system, not any individual, that has to be defeated and I think this quote highlights it so well. There are individual people that have to be dealt with and deserve everything that will be brought done upon them, but it’s the city itself that you have to watch out for or it will swallow you whole

I’m not going to go into detail about their tells because I’ve made a post devoted to them before and good lord this post is getting long, but I just want to emphasise that it’s a brilliant passage

“If you’ve ever cared about me at all, don’t follow” - I just absolutely adore that the next chapter starts with Inej following him mimicking these exact words I love her so damn much it makes giggle every time

“Inej was wrong about one thing. He knew exactly what he intended to leave behind when was gone: Damage” - *collapses* God I adore this there are no words

Ok wow if you made it this far thank you so much for reading this honestly I’m very impressed that you did because this is long. There are definitely details that I’ve lost because I had to require so much of it, which is a real shame but there’s still a lot to talk about here and I’ve written so much is possibly best for the sake of all our sanity’s that there isn’t more. Sorry I took so long to respond to your question but thank you so so much for asking it, I hope you all like this and that it at least made some sense because as I’ve said before these things often make more sense in my own head than they do on paper. Thanks for reading ��

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