"Saints, they're killing him...!"

It didn't matter who said it aloud, breaking the silence that had fallen over the little group as efficiently as silence could fall anywhere in a city of noise. No, it did not matter at all because they had all been thinking it, so whoever it was that actually said it aloud meant very little.

Well, everyone was thinking it apart of Inej, who was very much absent in spite of the fact Jesper could have sworn on as good as his name could stand that she had been standing next to him, and Nina could have sworn that she had been there to capture her more individualistic show of displeasure. But the Wraith was, well, far too wraith-like to concern herself with silly little things like telling the people she had been told to wait with that she was leaving.

Perched high upon the rooftop, blanketed in the gloom of a starless night, the clouds that hung heavy with the promise of inevitable rain provided the Crows with just the amount of cover they could afford, casting the four teenagers in nervous silhouette. Nonetheless, there was a degree of cautiousness that came as if it were perfectly natural - but had been honed to a fine art from the necessity to survive - to the Ketterdam criminal class.

Nobody particularly liked the sounds of senseless violence against someone they - even begrudgingly - cared about and yet the silence managed to feel all the worse.

Deep down below, past what was frankly an obscene amount of mezzanines and landings, all a show of elaborate wealth and a penchant for showing off, was Kaz Brekker, looking particularly unintimidating in just his shirt and trousers. In his defence, it was usually rather difficult to look intimidating while bound to a chair, one eye glued shut by ones' own sticky, drying blood, but he was managing a rather good show of haughty disinterest. Somehow, however, it was not the wounds that were increasing in number as his friends watched on helplessly from above, that made the sight as uncomfortable to see as it was.

No, they had stripped Kaz of his gloves when they bound him.

"If they don't kill him," Jesper hissed through his teeth, "I'm going to have to be the one to do it."

"And make his sulky corpse my problem?" Nina retorted, "You'd better not dare."

Under any other circumstances, the comment might have left Wylan attempting and entirely failing to mask a snort of amusement, but instead all it managed to lead to was a further worrying of the sleeve of his coat.

Another soundless blow was struck out against the jaw of sorry bastard, but whatever it was that the man had shouted at him was lost over the distance. Unfortunately, that left it very much up to the imagination of the others who had the misfortune of having to watch the display. But, and to no surprise, the comment had been shrugged off by the bound figure, who remarked, well, something that was clearly not what the man had wanted to hear. Rather embarrassingly, despite being very much in a perceived position of power, the capturer stamped his foot in a way that was not too dissimilar from the way a spoilt toddler might when not given a piece of candy while the capturee even went so far as to flash a bloody grin that held a challenge to it.

"What are you playing at, demjin?" even the usually more level-headed Matthias muttered under his breath.

This muttering had been accompanied by a slightly more quiet muttering which Jesper would have very much liked to have decided was some delightful and scandalous Fjerdan profanity, but Nina would have been smugly disappointed to inform was the equivalent of exclaiming 'Zounds!' at an inconvenience. However this would have had to remain in the realm of the hypothetical, as another particularly brutal blow upon Kaz's already injured face sent Wylan staggering away from the skylight.

"He's just a kid, surely they aren't going to kill a kid?" the demolitions expert of the group mumbled. But even as he said this, the lad knew he was not so naive as to think that something as inconsequential as age would stop someone from being murdered. There was not a single person there that had not been far too well acquainted with their own mortality than anyone should be, let alone a gaggle of teenagers.

But he was right about one thing. Kaz was looking terribly, tragically young down there. It was easy to forget, even for those who would like to think they were close to him - as close as he allowed anyone to get, which was still a cane's distance away at the best of times - that the rumours he spun and let be spun about him weren't true. He did not crawl out of some dingy corner, fully formed and dressed in the same shadows that created him. No, he was just a kid who, like those around him, suffered too much for anyone's good.

"I'm going down there," the sharpshooter said with the sort of certainty that only ever managed to come from absolutely foolish ideas, "I can't just stand around here watching him get the filth beaten out of him."

"He told us to wait here," Matthias interjected, "I would prefer to ask but we gave him our word."

"If he told us to throw ourselves off the roof right now, would you do it?"

Even if Jesper's comment had been more the product of his being very stressed, the answer was, unfortunately, yes. There was not a single person on that rooftop that would not have thrown themself off the roof if Kaz Brekker asked it of them. Of course, if he did ask, there would have been some grand and improbable escape planned and so they would have found themselves landing without a hair out of place.

"Oh! What the f-" Nina, who was the only person who remained by the window exclaimed a little too loudly. Dropping her voice a little she continued, "The bastard just scratched his nose."

"What?" Wylan asked, scrunching up his nose as he scampered back over.

"Kaz. The second that prick turned his back too, but of course he did," the alarmingly more necromancy Grisha exclaimed, throwing a hand into the air, "And we were here fretting about him while he was scratching his nose and only pretending to be in danger."

At this, Jesper let out an odd, shrill sound. It took even him a moment to realise this was a squawk of nervous laughter.

Frankly if Kaz really was just pretending, he deserved as many acting awards as any stage-trained actor. He let himself look pitiful enough allow for the man who was doing a genuinely awful job of interrogating him, and the two that were serving as guards, to believe it completely. This was their second mistake. Their first was to believe they were even remotely capable of besting Dirtyhands.

Even from their vantage point that allowed them to see better, the slightest shift in the way Kaz held his hands was entirely imperceptible. Like a magician worth half their money, he played into misdirection, letting his head hang weakly as if succumbing to a wave of exhaustion. This worked embarrassingly well, for his capturer, riddled with unearned hubris, made the grave mistake of leaning over the youth to gloat.

Grave was very much the correct terminology.

The second the man was in place, he swung his head upwards, launching himself up and into the man's nose, and while the sound of the resulting crunch did not reach his audience, the fact the man staggered once before dropping unceremoniously deceased to the ground made it clear he had struck his mark perfectly. Not giving the others the chance to react, he flung himself up from the chair with the sort of cautious grace that someone navigating a poorly leg for a significant portion of their life would have mastered early on.

The youth reached for the chair with a particular sense of finality to the motion, however it seemed nobody outside of the room itself would get the privilege of finding out precisely what he intended to do with this chair.

"We need to get back down, now."

There was a degree of elaborate dignity in the way Jesper practically leapt at the unexpected voice, whirling about in a way that set his coat billowing and twirling dramatically. One hand dropped to the pearl-handled guns he wore, the other raised to defend himself from whatever inevitable onslaught of horrors he had expected.

There were precisely no horrors, partaking of an onslaught or not, but there was an entirely unbothered Inej standing with a bundle of... something black in one hand and a stack of papers in the other.

"You've got to stop doing that!" the sharpshooter exclaimed, a little embarrassed to have been startled.

All this won was an impassive shrug, the Wraith turning on her rubber shoes, moving as silently as a summer fog across a lake as she went to make her exit. Though she did shoot a glance over her shoulder to make sure the others were following, which was nice of her as it would have been perfectly easy for her to vanish off into the night. Easier still because the others were not, in fact, actually following her.

It was Nina who lingered the longest, her attention drawn back down to her room that definitely did not have people holding Kaz captive anymore. Two were already dead, she noted with a certainty that disturbed her more for the fact it did not disturb her for knowing this as a fact without even needing to see the body. There was a tug to their presence, one that she had once known to be tied to life, but as life was rather a stranger to her now, it was death that took its place in calling to her.

It would not be long before there would be a third body. Of course there would be. Kaz hadn't been trapped in there with them, they had been trapped in there with him and he was going to do what he was unfairly good at. This being whatever was necessary with absolutely no conscience whatsoever.

The third attempt Matthias attempted at whisper-shouting drew her out of her macabre musing, quickly dashing off after the others.

The descent back down and off the building was spent in silence. It seemed more important to not slip and fall than it was to offer whatever senseless nervous chatter might come to mind. Ever the gentleman, Jesper helped Wylan navigate the slightly more tricky aspects of this, flashing his partner a twinkly grin despite everything. This courtesy did not carry over to Matthias, but he did not look at Nina as if he was contemplating shoving her off the building so that seemed like an absolute show of much the same sort of fondness.

In a way that managed to land equal parts between impressive and incredibly irritating, Kaz was already there waiting at street level. One could mistake the way he leaned against the wall as something nonchalant and not the easiest way to shift some of the weight from his leg. There was some actual nonchalance in the way he dabbed at his busted lip with a handkerchief that definitely did not wear his own initials.

"What was that back there?" a particularly restrained Nina exclaimed as she stomped up to the man.

"A necessity." came the reply, though the statement was a little less than eloquent as he needed to navigate a swollen lip.

"In what world was that," the woman began, gesturing to both the man's various injuries and back to the building, "A necessity?"

Inej handed the injured youth one of the bundles, which he swiftly navigated in a way that revealed that she had wrapped his gloves and cane in his coat. To much surprise, this actually won a nod of acknowledgement, which was as good as a most impassioned declaration of thanks coming from him.

"A world where this was the lesser evil," Kaz replied, paying more attention to the task of returning his gloves to where they ought to have been the entire time, "I would have preferred to have skipped the beating, but it meant the job was done so it can't be helped."

"So you didn't just want us sitting around watching you get beaten half to death then? That's nice." the sharpshooter remarked.

It seemed at first as if this was not going to be dignified with a reply at all, for once he had slipped his coat back on, Kaz turned to leave. He was leaning a little harder on his cane than usual, but that was the closest he came to letting on that any part of him was in pain while he was undeniably in far too much pain for his own good.

"We have enough enemies that they can put aside their differences in wishing harm upon us," he returned eventually, "Inej overheard a plot to have you lot killed, and frankly I'm far too busy to try and find replacements for you all, so this was the easiest way to get you out of the way and somewhere none of them would have thought to look."

"You knew?" Jesper exclaimed, tossing an exaggeratedly offended look towards the high-wire walking Wraith.

"Wait," Wylan added, "When were you planning to tell us that there were more people than usual planning our deaths?"

"When I was able to offer anything better than 'there are people that are proactively wanting us dead', there's very little to vague rumours even when they do have teeth." Inej replied.

"And do you know more than teeth?" the former witch hunter asked.

"I found what was either a list of people who definitely do hate us or definitely don't hate us in the study," the Wraith returned, making a point to raise the bundle of twine-bound papers that included but was not exclusively this list, "So it is better than nothing."

"If it took a list to remember them all, it's probably everyone that hates us." Nina stated as if this was the most normal thing in the world.

"Then for all of our sakes, I hope it is the longest list this city has ever seen." deadpanned Kaz in a way that was a little too sincere to be an entire joke.

And so, a sharpshooter and a demotions expert, a corpsewitch and the witch hunter who had wanted her to be just the corpse part until he realised he loved her, a Wraith and a Demon walked through the streets that served them just as much as it served them, once again very aware that someone was plotting against them.

Good.

Things were starting to get terribly dull.