Alec can hear him, something humming under the man's skin almost like a seraph blade dreaming in its hilt but off-key, a discordant whine that makes Alec want to cover his ears but he knows that wouldn't help; the noise isn’t really a noise, he can feel it in his blood, between his bones, not in his ears at all.

He doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know what he should say, or to who, but he can’t let it go, it pushes in the back of his throat and it has to be let out.

He thinks if he tries to speak and it doesn’t work, the pushing will get worse, will hurt, will perhaps not let him stop, not ever again.

If that’s true, (it is true, he doesn’t know why or how, but it is, he knows, knowledge deeper even than the laws and runes he’s memorized from the Grey Book, the ones that make the power under his skin flicker and flare, waiting for the first Mark to settle it), he can’t do what his father would prefer, and tell his parents in private. He can't risk them choosing not to listen.

If he can’t be discreet, he has to go far enough the other way that he’s inevitable.

Luckily, the hum from the man is just enough that his seraph blade doesn’t like it either, hissing to itself in the hilt when it ought to be asleep, and Alec knows he can tell them about that. He’s worked with the Weapons Master, with his father, his favorite chore is tending to the adamas in the Institute's care.

So he waits outside the armory, plants himself in the middle of the hall when the man and his parents approach, makes sure the door to the armory is cracked so Master Amira will hear him too, might even come out and back Alec up, if he’s lucky.

He waits, and he doesn’t step back against the wall, and his mother is lifting a brow and his father’s mouth is too tight, neither of them impressed that he’s just there in the way like a mundane too stupid to move.

Before either of them can do anything, Alec falls forward, prostrating himself before the man, arms spread and forehead pressed to the tile, because there’s no way to say what he’s going to say without it being an insult, and this is the only way he’ll get the whole thing out before he’s in too much trouble to be allowed to continue.

The man’s footsteps don’t slow, and Alec realizes he’s going to just walk right past him, and he’s offended enough his chest burns, and he almost can’t feel the pressure in his throat anymore.

How dare he ignore a sign of supplication like that? He’s got worse manners than Izzy and no excuse for them at all.

“Consul.” He hears his mother’s voice, low but steady, and the footsteps stop.

She’s as offended as he is, Alec can tell, he can taste it in her voice, but no one else can ever taste her moods like he can, so he’s sure no one else knows. Yet.

But he does, and it’s enough. If she knew what he knew, she’d speak, and they’d listen, they’d have to.

So he’ll have to do as well as she would.

“Begging your forgiveness, sir.” Alec projects his voice as well as he can, for all he’s talking to the floor. He can’t raise his head, not even an inch.

The Consul doesn’t say anything, but neither does he move.

“Why do you not care for your blade, sir?”

There’s a shocked silence, and Alec can hear the weapons in the armory startle awake as his father reaches, and he can feel Master Amira’s axe-blades as she joins them in the hallway.

“What seems to be the trouble, sirs?” Master Amira’s voice is smooth and clean and Alec reminds himself to breathe.

“The Lightwoods are about to lose their heir,” the Consul answers, his voice tight and the hum beneath his skin twisting down a half a pitch, sharp and unpleasant, “unless they explain his behavior very quickly, and very well.”

“I do not think so.” His mother’s voice rises, as pure a tone as any Alec has ever heard from adamas and he realizes he has lifted his head to look at her, that everyone is looking at her, the pair of clerks who follow the Consul everywhere, someone in every doorway down the hall, a silhouette behind Master Amira he can’t quite identify; even in the glimpse he can get of the corner of Ops behind his parents, everyone has turned toward the sound of her voice. “You should answer him, Consul.”

The Consul’s eyes widen, and his shoulders go back, and that feeling of danger rises, rises, and then it’s cut off, a sharp clean silence as Alec’s father takes one, single, step, letting the heel of his boot hit the tile just so. “My son is a Lightwood.”

“Recognized and sworn before an Iron Sister, sir.” Amira adds, and Alec blinks, aware now of what the odd visit last year had meant, the woman in white who had laughed as if she wasn’t dressed for mourning, who had shown him her throwing daggers and grinned when he’d hit the target with them, and given him two pure slivers of adamas to keep, one for each boot.

The Consul has gone still, and his expression is unimpressed, but the hum changes pitch again, and his clerks look nervous, eyes moving too quickly for all they’ve kept their bodies still.

“Sir.” Robert speaks into the silence, and his voice is like nothing Alec has heard from him before. He’s still quiet, still deferential and polite in tone, but it’s sharp somehow, the glint of a knife as it is slowly pulled from a sheath, the light of a seraph blade the instant before it materializes. He’s not really asking a question. “Your answer.”

“My blade has been cared for by four generations of the Dieudonné line, his question is an insult to my bloodline that has earned no answer beyond contempt.”

“Then why is it crying?” Alec doesn’t lower his head this time, for all his neck aches from the angle required to look up at the adults surrounding him. “It is awake, sir, and in pain, and you are not soothing it.”

Master Amira makes an odd choked-off noise he’s never heard before, but the rest of the hall is silent, and the silence grows, deeper and thicker, until Alec realizes he’s looking at his mother again, that they’re all looking at his mother again.

“His words are True.” Maryse’s voice is a hiss, barely louder than the blade, yet it carries. Her voice fills the hallway, perhaps through to Ops as well, perhaps beyond; it feels to Alec like the whole Institute can hear it, this one soft note of revelation whispering between them all. Her voice still rings like a bell against something inside him, something he has no name for but recognizes as the weight behind that pressure in his throat, the balance in his blood that hears better than his ears. “You will answer, or you will be foresworn.”

“You cannot-” one of the clerks attempts to speak, but Master Amira snorts and they give up.

“My parents were very traditional.” His mother’s voice sounds normal now, calm and conversational. But it still tastes like copper to Alec, like blood, and the tension in the hallway doesn’t ease. He eases himself back and up until he’s kneeling. Until he’s ready. “When my brother was forsaken, they dedicated me to the Mortal Sword as the new Trueblood heir.” Maryse smiles, and Alec can feel everyone except his father move back, trying to get away from it. “I absolutely can.”

The Consul looks contrite, bows his head in apology, enough that Alec can feel the other adults relax, just a little.

But the hum beneath Dieudonné’s skin has turned into a scream, his seraph blade wails in grief and fury, and Alec is moving before he realizes it, one hand in each boot, a flick of each wrist, and two slivers of adamas go through the Consul’s throat before he can speak.

Shock holds them all still, the scream rises into a shriek, twists and throbs and fades, at last, though Alec can’t hold in the shudder while it lingers. The Consul’s eyes are still open, but darker than they were, than they should be, and blood is dripping from them as well as his throat, and his ears, and his nose.

He stays standing for too long, still and stiff, and then a drop of blood hits the floor, one, then another, and finally he sways, and falls. His mouth opens as he hits the ground, and a dark cloud rises from it, smelling of sulfur and steel and something green that Alec will recognize five years later the first time he handles angelbane.

The former Consul jerks, his joints moving wrong in his death-throws, something too sharp to each convulsion, something other.

“Fuck,” someone Alec doesn’t know breaks the silence two long heartbeats after the body stops moving. It’s only then that he sees the rune that has now appeared, a Circle just like Hodge’s, broken by twin spears of adamas piercing through it, one on each side.

No one moves for yet another heartbeat, and Alec can’t look away from the man on the ground, the man who clearly wasn’t just a nephilim, not anymore, not like the rest of them. The man he’d killed. He’d killed the Consul of the Clave, in front of witnesses, in the middle of the Institute, before his parents…

He can feel a shared look over his head more than he can see it, and then his mother’s hand is on his shoulder and his father is calling out orders and she’s leading him away and his footsteps are running to Ops and an alert alarm is sounding, one Alec can’t hear properly through the blood rushing through his ears, and he’s relieved when his mother takes them both to his room, and tucks him into bed, and shields his door with her personal rune as well as every warding rune he’s ever seen. He smiles at her in thanks, and lets himself go.

She’s there again when he wakes, and at first he can’t remember anything. He starts to move, and feels the tug of an IV, the rattle of the stand next to his bed shifting with his movement. He blinks, and his mother sighs. It sounds like relief, and he blinks again even as she moves close, reaches out and brushes his hair off his forehead.

“It’s been a long time since an heir manifested two blood gifts at once, especially before receiving his first Mark.”

Alec had opened his mouth to… he wasn’t sure, probably apologize for being lazy after committing murder and then not even cleaning the ensuing mess up himself, but that stops him. He shuts his mouth, swallows, blinks for a third time, trying to get his thoughts to line up into something more coherent than what?

“Is that what I did?”

His mother smiles, and it’s as far as possible from her expression in the hallway, warm and soothing and grateful. “That’s what you did.”

“Oh.”

He lets that sink in, lets the implications and conclusions and possibilities trickle their way through his thoughts. “Does that mean I’m not gonna be buried at a crossroads for killing the Consul?”

His mother winces, leans forward until her forehead rests against his, and he feels dizzy and lightheaded with something almost like joy as he recognizes what she’s doing as comforting, for both of them. “Oh baby, no.”

He closes his eyes and lets himself feel the weight of his mother being his mother before anything and everything else, and doesn’t even fight it when he feels his eyes getting wet and his skin flushing with relief and confusion and love and who knows what else.

“You will never be in trouble for what you did to Malachi.” That chime was back in his mother’s voice as she whispered against his skin, and it soothed him in a way nothing else could, resonating against his worries until they faded. “You saved the entire Clave from whatever he would have done in the Circle’s name, whatever he could have done to our Institute with the Curse Valentine had put in him when he was discovered. The Inquisitor is going through the entire Council, soul by soul, to make sure she finds them all, and it’s only because of you that she has the power to do it.”

Oh.

Eventually she lifts her head, and her eyes are damp too, he can see it when she blinks. “But you will have to go to the City of Bones and meet a Silent Brother and the Soul-Sword.” Her smile quirks, and he realizes there’s pride there in her expression, on top of a complex mix of emotions that don’t make any more sense than his own. “Though that might be less scary for you than it was for me at your age, if you can hear the Soul-Sword as well as you hear seraph blades.”

“I can hear all the weapons in the armory.” Alec corrects before he can think about it. “You can’t?”

His mother laughs, short and damp and beautiful. “Even your father can’t, and he’s the only Lightwood left who can call his weapons to him. You’ve got a stronger Blood-Gift than he does.”

“I do?”

His mother nods. “Your father asked me to tell you he’s sorry he didn’t tell you so earlier. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, either.”

What.

This entire conversation is so far outside of anything he’s ever felt before, and his bones feel too light-weight under his skin and he doesn’t understand. “Why?”

“Did you consider telling me or your father about what you heard from Malachi’s blade?”

Alec frowns, and his mother lifts a hand, palm facing him, stopping him before he can protest the change of topic. “I promise I’m answering your question, please.”

His parents apologized, and his mother said please to him, like she meant it.

He shook his head from side-to-side. “I knew you’d want me to, but.” He stops. He doesn’t know how to explain that feeling, that pressure that he still suspected would have broken him if he’d tried to speak the truth and been told to keep quiet. His mother’s fingers brush against the line of his throat, and his eyes widen as he stares up at her, as he sees a tear overflow and slowly slide down her cheek as she nods, just a little, and he realizes she knows exactly what he’s not saying.

“We taught you we couldn’t be trusted, so you had to act alone.” There’s that chime again, and another tear falling. “But that’s all going to change now.”

It’s a promise, he knows, he can feel it. “What is that?”

“That is the Trueblood gift. My father could make any vow magically binding just by witnessing it, and his father could tell when someone stated something untrue, even if they believed it themselves.” Her mouth quirked. “He called it tasting lies.”

“Can you do that?”

“No.” She closes her eyes, too slowly to be just a blink, and this time when she sighs he can feel the weight behind it. “I can hear Truth sometimes, ride it, verify it, make sure everyone else believes it.”

She opens her eyes, and there’s guilt now, and grief, dark and deep and endless. “Valentine recruited your father and I personally, and I believed everything he told me about what he was doing, and why, and because I believed him, because there was a Trueblood supporting him, a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise have let him be… let him get away with, well. Everything.”

Alec goes still. He can tell she’s telling the Truth still, and he doesn’t want to know that, doesn’t want to feel it, but he can, he does, and he’s never ever going to be able to forget what this feels like, this truth that turned his whole life into a lie that he’d never known he was telling.

He swallows down the nausea, the outrage, and waits.

“But when your father told me what he learned about what Valentine was really like, I couldn’t believe the lies any more. We turned ourselves into the Clave, and they only let us back because I rode the Truth when I vowed that we would be loyal to the Council, when I vowed on my bloodline, back to my parents and.” Her voice drops, lower and softer. “And down to my son, who is a Trueblood too.”

“And then you lied to me about it.”

“The Council forbid anyone from talking about the Circle.”

He gives her the look that line deserves.

She’s almost trembling, her hands held too tightly by her sides. “We didn’t want you to have to bear the weight of our mistakes.”

“But I do.” He looks at her, really looks at her, in the same way he looks at the weapons in the armory, and the hilts strapped to the side of visiting nephilim, and the way he’d listened to Malachi and heard Valentine’s Curse in his blood.

Alec can almost see the pattern of the fragile scaffolding of his mother’s emotions, suppressed down under her skin, forced to only exist between the fine lines of her plans, of her will and desire and ambition and pain, all constraining her gift into something so much smaller than it could have been. The foundation of that scaffolding seems shaken, it feels fragile. But it hasn’t moved, hasn’t fallen. She regrets how he feels, sincerely means to change, but she hasn’t, not yet. It’s all still there.

“Every single one of them has been put on my shoulders, and because you hid them from me I thought all that weight was mine, was me, that I deserved every harsh word and mistrustful look, and every single one of them was about you.”

Maryse rears back, but they both hear the Truth in his voice, the sound that resonates between his bones, that builds and forces its way out, that refuses to be silenced. That he is never ever going to try and silence. “You can go.”

She opens her mouth. He lifts his chin, and she concedes. “Amira will take my place with you until the next medic visit.”

He almost frowns, wondering what she means. “You burned through almost all your angelic energy.” She tilts her chin and he glances sideways at the IV bag, half full of something that isn’t just saline, judging by the color of the label. “And you’ve been asleep for almost three days.”

Three? he mouths, more to himself than her, but she sees it, understands it, nods.

There are circles under her eyes, and he can hear the exhaustion she'd been trying to hide when she speaks again. “Let us try and take care of you this time.”

He nods, accepting her peace offering for what it is, and she leaves.

He settles, waits until the door opens again to let Master Amira in.

Only then does he close his eyes, knowing he’s safe, knowing she’s there for him. He knows he’ll forgive his parents when they come back, knows that if they try at all he’ll let them be his parents again. But he’s not sure if they’ll ever earn back his trust.

But he can trust Master Amira, and he’ll make sure to tell Izzy the truth, make sure she knows exactly which consequences are hers, and which are not. He’ll do the same for Max once he’s old enough to talk, and they’ll never have to bear the weight of their parents’ mistakes the way he did, never be expected to fix everything the Clave and Circle broke just because they were offered the mercy of living.