kanej headcanon: first kiss
Inej is on shore leave for the winter, and even if the wind is biting and the rooftops chilled to frost, she insists on perching outside Kaz’s window to feed the crows.
Kaz thinks she’s a fool for doing this in such conditions, but he thinks himself the bigger fool when he cannot resist crawling out the window to sit beside her, aching leg be damned. She looks up at him with a bright grin, warm and radiant in the cold heart of Ketterdam. Perhaps he’s no different from the other greedy scavengers that circle her now, vying for the chance to feed from her shivering hand.
But he remembers that unlike the crows, he has the ability to do something about her trembling, half-frozen fingers. He swiftly peels the gloves from his own hands and holds the pair out for her to take.
She glances at him quizzically, but he looks away, trying to stifle the uncharacteristic shyness that he feels when she’s near. “These damned crows are going to give you frostbite,” he mutters gruffly, feeling the tips of his ears turn pink.
A smile pushes up her lips (berry-colored, slightly chapped from the wind, bottom lip just slightly fuller than the top - details Kaz steals from a single glance, but he wants more, wants to look again) as she takes the gloves and slips them on (and doesn’t that sight just deepen his flush, the familiar leather caressing her bronze skin, the invocation of intimacy).
“Well, I have it on good authority that they have no manners,” she teases.
And he doesn’t mean for it to happen, but when they lock eyes, it’s as though his body can resist the pull no longer. He leans toward her face, closer, and she begins to fall forward -
and then he abruptly pulls back.
“I’m sorry,” he stutters, drawing a hand through his hair. He looks as flustered as he feels, voice breathy.
“Sorry?” Inej repeats back dazedly, still caught up in the sensation of warm gloves on her hands, the clouds of her breath comingling with his.
He buries his hands in the pockets of his coat, preventing himself from trying to reach toward her again. “I didn’t mean to invade your space, or make you uncomfortable. I should’ve asked first.”
Her brow furrows. “I wasn’t uncomfortable. Why did you think I would be?”
Kaz pulls at his hair again, frustrated at the effort to find the right words. (Inej can’t help but feel a little proud that she’s the only person who can fluster this infamously unintimidated man.) “Because I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t… because I was looking at you like that.”
He swallows heavily. “Like I wanted to kiss you. Like I want you.”
She leans closer, as though determined to break his careful control. It’s been years, now, of this delicate back and forth, of a balance finer than the tightropes she’d walked in her youth - and Inej is sick of waiting to let go, sick of waiting to fall into the man before her when her heart knows exactly where it wants to land. “Don’t you?”
“Yes,” he gasps. “But I don’t want you to feel…like you used to feel, when men wanted to kiss you.”
Oh. If Kaz didn’t misunderstand her so thoroughly in this moment, she might actually be charmed at his hesitation to hurt her. Instead, she frowns, choosing her words carefully. “They didn’t want to kiss me. They wanted to kiss an exotic, forbidden thing. They wanted to kiss the Lynx, because she wasn’t allowed to refuse.”
She leans closer again, brown eyes meeting brown eyes, until he can see nothing but her.
“Kaz…do you want to kiss the Lynx?”
He shakes his head vigorously, forehead creasing in affronted fervor. “Of course not.”
She nods gently, reaches out and smooths his worried brow with her gloved fingers. “I know. I know that you want to kiss me.” She pauses, leaves space for her next words to penetrate his nervous mind. “That’s why I want you to.”
He watches her for a few breaths, his chest panting in and out with the anticipation buzzing between them. “I’ve never done this before,” he admits, as if she didn’t already know.
Her voice is as quiet as it’s ever been, eyes vulnerable as they flicker between his eyes and his lips. “Me neither,” she whispers.
They barely note the snow squall beginning around them, ready to cover the dark Ketterdam streets and rooftops with the first snow of the season: a rare clean slate.
Inej worries, for a moment, what reactions a kiss could dredge up for Kaz. Would her cold-chapped lips would feel more like a corpse than a comfort? Would he resent her for making him try?
Would they collide for one precious moment, just for him to pull farther away than ever before? (And, selfishly, she thinks - would it be worth it to steal this moment anyway?)
But because he knows her better than anyone, reads her better than anything, he tells her: “It’s okay. I don’t think you’ll hurt me. Not with this.”
She nods gently, swallows. “Okay,” she whispers. “I won’t hurt you.”
And whether it was just her wishful thinking or a premonition, her lips on his don’t hurt at all.
He’s pulled into her unexpected warmth; she falls into his promise of safety - just them, together, as the rest of the world blurs white.
