#discere

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          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.”