#ave verse

          Tomorrow then Alec had told Jace, the promise seemingly speeding up the arrival of the new dawn, bringing the shadow of the Institute closer to his home and along with it the need to make a decision: Would he keep his word at all? 

          On one hand, the last thing they needed right then was the trouble a visit like that was bound to bring – the likes of which he would associate with Clary’s presence in the past. On the other hand, Jace would not rest otherwise, would not stop yearning for the Institute, and for Clary, until he got to see it for himself. It wasn’t a mess Alec felt eager to approach ( or willing at all ), but it couldn’t be helped and, like ripping off a band-aid, he rather do it quickly and all at once.

          His bedside manners had never been that good to begin with.

          If Jace were to resent him, he was bound to do it either way, as for the people inside the Institute – the ones Alec had once considered his friends and family – those had made up their minds about him years ago. 

          So Alec wasn’t worried as much as he was weary of whatever might be going on inside the Institute’s walls, having chosen to wait at the park outside after accompanying Jace there. His excuse was that staying there allowed him to smoke ( five cigarette buds at his feet corroborating that argument ), while the reality of facts was that Alec simply wasn’t up to facing his sister as her boyfriend; let alone head of the Institute Clary Fairchild. 

          Not only had his last visit to the place been nothing but an excuse to steal the Clockwork Angel from the library, something someone was bound to have figured out by now, but he had done the unthinkable bringing Jace back from the dead. As proud as he felt at his own deed it likely wouldn’t sit as well with anyone else in New York, shadowhunters and downworlders alike. 

          Leave it to them to agree only when it came to opposing him these days, Alec thought bitterly, a billow of smoke escaping his lips as they turned upwards into a scowl.

          They wouldn’t understand, no one really did, not even those who had lost their respective parabatai in battle. Being bound to Jace had felt like being connected to the sun itself, a life-force as glorious as it was destructive, and something Alec only truly realized once it had been gone. Perhaps he had felt like that due to Jace’s angel blood, or maybe he’d just taken the blow too harshly, but either way it felt like no one else was capable of understanding his loss – and anyone that tried to simply proved him right in thinking so. 

          It shouldn’t surprise them that he had finally done it, he reasoned, even if the fact he succeeded was unexpected, it shouldn’t shock them that he tried. It was either that or to follow him in death, Alec had known for years now, so how could anyone blame him for daring? 

          With self-righteous wrath and dark eyes blazing, that’s how, or at least that’s the image that greeted him once his head reeled back from the impact of a ( at least half-deserved ) punch to the face, his lit cigarette fallen to the grass amidst the commotion. Alec had seen her coming, but the part of him that thought her anger justified stilled himself to allow one blow to connect. It was still his little sister after all, even if sisterly affection was the furthest thing from Isabelle’s Lightwood’s expression right then. 

“What the hell were you thinking!?” she hissed, fist reeling back and warned down by the rise of Alec’s dark eyebrows. He had allowed her one hit, and the taste of blood that came with it flooded his mouth still, but he wouldn’t be so generous when it came to a second one. “Never mind that, you clearly weren’t thinking at all.” 

          Isabelle shook her head, most of her anger subsiding as she took in the image of her brother, somehow even more ragged than he had been the last time she saw him, eyes surrounded by dark circles and lips stained crimson as he spat down some blood. 

          When she spoke again her voice was softer, tainted by concern, thought it would never be as soft as it had been in the past when looking up to him was done out of more than a simple physical need. “What have you done?” 

          The answer to that question was as complicated as it was simple. Alec highly doubted his sister meant to ask about the ritual or the actual means of Jace’s resurrection, the whole lot of them more concerned with the ethics of things these days than they were with anything else. It made him miss the Izzy that would have gone against the whole Clave in the past if it meant doing the right thing.

“I did what had to be done,” he offered simply, occupying his hands with rummaging for a fresh cigarette and holding it at the uninjured corner of his lips, unlit. “What all of you refused to do.” 

          Jace Wayland died during the battle of Brocelind Plain, while the bulk of Shadowhunters’ forces fought off the invading demons, struck down by Valentine himself so that his blood could be used to summon the archangel Raziel- or at least that’s what they told him. All Alec could remember of  Brocelind Plain was pain, the most unbelievable searing pain that blossomed from within his chest and drowned out anything and everything else. The pain had a sound to it, a name, pulsing inside his head over and over again. Jace. After that, there was only darkness. 

          Later he would learn that it had been Magnus’ doing, the oblivion. He had been losing it, losing everything, in the middle of a battlefield and it was the only way–  The only way to make sure he didn’t get hurt, the only way to make sure he didn’t follow his parabatai right along. On bad days, Alec wished Magnus would have let him. 

          Entreat me not to leave thee their vows had said, but Jace had been alone when he died. Alone, with Clary, it didn’t matter because Alec hadn’t been there and he had swore on it. Whither thou goest, I will go, he promised as they stood in the circle of fire, and in the end it meant nothing because he hadn’t been there and he was still here, still alive, though Alec would claim that whatever he had it wasn’t much of a life at all. 

          The Mortal War was over, it ended as soon as Jace was gone and Alec woke up to a world at peace that made little to no sense to him. They were heroes, all of them, but half of his soul was gone along with his parabatai and he couldn’t celebrate it. None of them really could, but then again, no one could feel this loss the same way that he did. Jace meant something to each of them, a brother, a lover, a son... But to Alec he had been everything. His first love, his best friend, his brother, his soulmate. 

          The rune on his hip faded. It bleed out along with Jace and, just like Jace, all that was left of it was a painful reminder of what he’d lost that day. It was stark white against his pale skin and no other rune would burn over it, no matter how much Alec tried. Love, Mourning, Mnemosyne; like the memory of his parabatai the original rune refused to fade away and Alec carried it around the same way he carried Jace in his heart: like a bleeding wound where everyone else merely saw a scar. 

          That wasn’t to say the others didn’t mourn him, they all did in their own ways, or at least Alec assumed they did. Jace’s body was burned in a pyre and the ashes and smoke that came out of it made Alec’s eyes sting; He could still feel them, months later, clogging his throat and burning at his eyes, clouding his vision. The mourning rune at the top of his chest faded to nothing but a scar, but Alec drew it again and again, he hadn’t cried for his parabatai, not once, but he still refused to let him go. 

          It was Clary, of all people, who ended up giving him a reason to cry, though not mourning tears as she might have intended. “He is in a better place,” she told him, months after it’d happened and when it already seemed like he was the only one refusing to move on. All around them people were rebuilding, rescuing what they could from their old lives and raising a new Institute and new Clave from the ashes under Clary’s command. But not him, not Alec, because how could he move on with a hole on his chest with the shape of the best thing he’d ever have? 

          He became hard to handle, intolerant, withdrawn, the laws that had once served as pillars for everything he’d believed in now nothing but scrap and ruins. What good was the Clave and their empty laws anyway when they bred nothing but soldiers sent to die on their meaningless wars? How good or righteous could their whole institution be when it bred men like Valentine while it sent those like Jace out to die? Even if he was in a better place now...

“You can’t know that,” he snapped. 

“But I do!” Clary said back, so sure of it, so ablaze with the same fire Jace had once fallen for, and that’s what made Alec stop and listen. On bad days, he wished he never had. 

          Clary said that she knew because she did, because Raziel himself had told her so when she asked that Jace be brought back. There had been a chance and Clary Fairchild had given up on it, on Jace, for something as abstract and fleeting as peace. The Mortal War had ended then and there, by the will of the Angel, because Clary settled for it.

          The revelation was probably meant to comfort Alec, but all it did was set him ablaze. For months he had been not more than a ghost, but he was moving then, his body a flash as it lounged towards Clary, his hands vicious around her throat as he slammed her into the nearest wall, hazel eyes more alive than ever and shinning with tears of the purest anger. She had a chance to bring him back and she didn’t take it! After that it didn’t matter that Izzy pulled him away, the damage was done and Alec was changed man. That night when he redrew his mourning rune for the umpteenth time, he did it with a promise that he wouldn’t fail where Clary had. 

          Alec was nearly impossible after that, but they gave him leeway, they had to, he was Alec Lightwood after all, Jace Herondale’s parabatai, a war hero... No one there would kick him out, no matter what he did, but Alec went away himself– He knew he had become too much for the Clave to handle the day he killed another hunter for daring to voice opinions that were far too reminiscing of the views of the Circle. One hunter killing another in the middle of the Institute, it was too much, but what could they do? Call the high-inquisitor, Robert Lightwood, and expect him to condemn his son? Alec didn’t give them the time to figure it out anyway, he left that day, and thought they never came for him he knew he wasn’t welcome at the Institute anymore. 

          It mattered little, in the end, since Alec had more to do now. His plan was as crazy as it was ambitious and it took years, years and effort and bloodshed, all so that he could get his hands on the right rituals and the right magic needed to summon an angel. Not any angel, but Ithuriel himself – it had to be him – and once Alec finally had that he still had to make sure he had something the angel would want as well, something good enough to be worth a life.

          More than five years had passed since Jace’s death by the time Alec finally got to draw the right runes on the summoning circle, so much time that one could claim he was hardly Alec Lightwood anymore. But everything he had done, all he had sacrificed had lead up to this. It was his own blood he spilled over the circle, just another sacrifice he was willing to make for this chance. He knew that it would be the last, that if it didn’t work he would have no choice but to finally follow his parabatai into the unknown.

B said to me “it will get better” and then you posted that latest bit so I won’t believe another word either of you are saying! 😡

okay but let me tell you, i was listening to Adele songs and really feeling the love and gearing up for a teary reunion ( even tho I shouldn’t ), and Alec really tried to get past the whole ‘i’d rather be dead’ thing but then Jace had to go and brink up Clary fucking Fray and he just lost it. my boy tried, but he lost it. 

p.s. for added angst please listen to Snuff while reading

Love is clockworks / And cold steel / Fingers too numb to feel / Squeeze the handle / Blow out the candle / Love is blindness

Love is blindness / I don’t want to see / Won’t you wrap the night / Around me?Oh my love / Blindness

A little death / Without mourning / No call / And no warning / Baby, a dangerous idea / That almost makes sense

let’s just i can see why it reminded you of them, specially Alec.. i also loved the melody of it for the verse’s vibe ( kinda reminds me of My Chem at some parts, js ) 

see that thing on the floor? yep, that is me, crying too. *feels*

IS THAT A CHALLENGE