(be) the lightning in me that strikes relentless | The Mortal Instruments | Clary/Jace/Simon
t: (be) the lightning in me that strikes relentless
f: The Mortal Instruments
p: Clary/Jace/Simon
ch: rarepairfest for sandrine
r/wc: PG/3020
w: SPOILERS for City of Heavenly Fire
s: [Futurefic] She didn’t notice then; she thinks that she might now.
n: [Title from Snow Patrol's The Lightning Strike.] Technically I've got 10k of a Clary/Isabelle college AU on my laptop, but this is the first Mortal Instruments fic I've written that's made it to the internet, so, hooray! Really, if you haven't read City of Heavenly Fire, this will spoil the crap out of it for you.
In the pages of another sketchbook, this one a birthday present from Maryse, the cover inlaid with an angelic rune that thrums under her fingertips even through the heavy stock, Clary draws her life now. Their lives now, the lives they never thought they’d get, when adulthood was a joke destination on the other side of a knife blade.
Clary turned twenty-one last week. She can legally drink now, and she still has all of her fingers and toes, and hey, she isn’t dead. All three are small victories, even if Isabelle’s been mixing the cocktails for years and sometimes Clary feels like the only person not to have scrambled out of some kind of semi-literal grave in recent years.
(“Terribly maudlin, Clarissa,” Jace told her, spinning her under her birthday chandelier lights until her curls were alight with glitter, like this future was always theirs for the taking.)
So she draws pictures of the things that surround her: of Jace, who deals with chance by being awful about it, and of Simon, who deals with change by treating it like it isn’t happening, and of Isabelle and Magnus, knowing spectators who watch what Clary can’t even name with amusement tucked into their every expression.
“I thought I’d find you in here.” Jace, louche and barefoot and eternally honey-smirking, tapping on her doorframe too late, keeping up her illusion of privacy that she gave up a long time ago.
Clary slams her sketchbook closed, almost too fast, maybe trying to hide something from him that she can’t define yet, too fragile to be thought or spoken or touched.
“Been drawing me too accurately again?” Jace asks too mildly, tossing his hair. “I’ve told you that you’ll burn all our eyes out with my own natural brilliance.”
“How will I ever capture your modesty?” Clary responds, taking his offered hand on a laugh that doesn’t shiver, not quite.
The parabatai rune beneath her left collarbone twinges.
-
There was an argument that wasn’t an argument that went on for months, of course. Sometimes there was yelling and sometimes there were slammed doors or smashed crockery and way too much crying, really.
“No, it wasn’t this fraught when Jace and Alec decided,” Isabelle said, sighing, in response to the question Clary hadn’t actually asked her, “but boys are boys and it’s not like they told anyone until it was too late to really do anything about it.”
The discussion was spreading through the Institute by this point, out into the rest of the world. Clary found herself receiving emails from people she’d never heard of, late night transatlantic phone calls that were responses to things she hadn’t needed to say in the first place. Luke, after three consecutive coffee meetings where he just stared at his hands and mumbled and bent latte spoons into awkward shapes, wrote her a fifteen page letter. It said some things she’s not even sure he ever told her mom.
What was happening to Simon was probably worse.
“But what if I die?” he asked. They were supposed to be training and Isabelle had just swept his legs out from underneath him in an efficient fashion.
“Well.” Jace tipped his head, tapping a throwing knife against his lower lip. “You’ve already done that before.”
Simon pulled himself up from the floor to glare at him properly. “Whose side are you on? Because I was pretty sure this was one thing we actually agreed on, amongst a whole range of times of your opinions being horribly, awfully wrong.”
Jace’s grin widened into his favourite my haircut and a selection of my life choices are so much better than yours one, the one Clary finds attractive almost in spite of herself, but nobody else does.
“Of course,” he replied, “this is the worst idea anyone’s ever had-”
“Hey,” Clary interjected, because in the scheme of things this wasn’t even in the top ten, but Jace ignored her.
“-and that means that you and Clary are almost definitely going to go through with it at the earliest and least convenient opportunity, because that is what you do.”
Simon looked as though he was going to try and respond, but then he gave up in the face of what was unfortunately somewhat accurate.
“Yes,” Isabelle cut in, “because literally no one in here has ever done that before, with disastrous and now famous consequences.”
(Isabelle had given her a one-shouldered shrug when Clary inevitably turned to her for support. “Please,” she’d said, “I can’t think of anything worse.”
She left out the part where her options were thin on the ground, and Clary was kind enough not to bring it up.)
When making endless lists to show Simon (and by extension a loudly cynical Jace) about why she needed him to be her parabatai, Clary sometimes felt she should scratch out all the logical reasons, all the evidence she’d gathered from her research, and tell Simon the truth: that he already was, always had been, and the runes wouldn’t be telling anyone anything they didn’t already know.
-
There were points, years ago, when Clary thought that Simon would look the way he did forever. That same smile, and the eyes that weren’t completely human any more but wore the expressions they’d always worn. That he was frozen in time, trapped like one of her sketches, sweet sixteen and always a little murdered.
But Simon now isn’t Simon from five years ago; he’s broader and he laughs more and his skin is covered in the Marks that define them all now, and he’s different and the same and Clary’s more used to the constant flicker of him living in her head than maybe she should be. Jace and Alec talked about it, of course; that is to say Alec muttered and Jace lied through his teeth with airy hand gestures, and Clary sort of understood that she’d be able to sense Simon’s presence, his pain, perhaps. It’s different than that, though, and Clary finds something comforting in that, the ebb and flow of emotions and instincts that don’t always belong to her, that she can’t always define, but that feel at home anyway.
She supposes that they were always in and out of each other’s skin as children.
It’s Simon’s fingers around her wrist before battle, his lip tucked between his teeth, and sometimes she misses leaning forward to press his glasses up his nose with a finger, the hint of a flush in his cheeks. First vampirism fixed his sight, and then the rather more boring Lasik option fixed it the second time around; no one wants a smashed lens bringing their fighting to an abrupt close. His strength rune is bold and hot as it coils up against her skin, and she huffs a breath or two to fix it into place. Simon looks up at her when he’s done, teeth white in his grin, and Clary for a moment wonders where the little boy who couldn’t tie his laces has gone. She remembers, then, that he’s still part of her, with the Anne of Green Gables girl with her braids and her grazes and her mind held hostage by a spell she couldn’t have ever imagined.
“You’re worryingly introspective,” Simon remarks, stele packed away, witchlight glittering in his hand, “are you going to think emo poetry really really hard at whatever demons we find?”
“I’m going to read them some of that stuff you wrote when you were thirteen,” Clary replies, immediate, nudging his shoulder with hers. “About, what was it, a redhead named Mary?”
“I was very subtle,” Simon replies, even as he reaches for his dagger. There’s no movement yet; but there will be.
“You took out a couple of letters!” Clary points out.
“Yeah, and you didn’t notice,” Simon responds.
He looks good in gear, natural, flowing shadows and dark hair, and he still lines the walls of his new apartment with anime posters and drags the bemused Shadowhunters who grew up in Idris to whatever Marvel’s latest offering is. He’s Simon, and he’s not Simon.
“I didn’t,” Clary agrees, and grips her seraph blade as the darkness moves.
She didn’t notice then; she thinks that she might now.
-
Interlude: Simon
(Clary thinks that they don’t talk about it, but they do. Well, they talk around it enough that by the end of it it’s almost like they’ve had an actual conversation.
“I think Magnus is trying to offer me advice,” Simon says gloomily.
Alec goes on a lot of fancy vacations with Magnus; they send back alarmingly cute photos and Alec writes long emails about demons that he encountered and killed that are of interest only to Jace, who reads them avidly with popcorn. When he’s gone, Simon has somehow become Jace’s training partner; they’re both pretty sure that they’re not going to accidentally on purpose hurt each other. Nothing that an iratze can’t fix, anyway.
Jace is doing something complicated with a blade that looks very pretty and possibly turns your opponent into mincemeat, and possibly just looks flashy and is no actual practical use at all.
“Advice on what?” he asks, and then tips his head a little. “Advice on kissing boys?”
Simon doesn’t suffocate on his own breathing because while he’ll never exactly be cool he is a Shadowhunter now, and they don’t do things like that, so he says: “I was in a band.”
“And you never kissed the boys in it. Though you did live with Jordan. And you were kind of weird about Raphael.” Jace tips his head. “Should I be worried that they’re both dead?”
“You’ve been dead before,” Simon responds easily because well, who hasn’t, these days, and hits a bullseye with a throwing knife. “And hey, why isn’t Magnus giving you boy kissing advice?”
Jace stops twirling his blades around long enough to do a ridiculous hair toss that makes him look like he should be selling Herbal Essences. The way Simon’s stomach clenches has nothing to do with the way Clary feels whenever Jace looks at her, though sometimes he finds himself wishing it was just a stray handful of emotions that aren’t his. “Do I look like I need kissing advice?”
“You look like My First Vampire Slayer Barbie,” Simon responds, knowing already that it’ll go over Jace’s head, and adds: “also, screw you, I don’t need kissing advice.”
“You wear t-shirts with stuff written on them and you’re not dating Izzy anymore,” Jace says, smooth, and throws one of the blades hard enough to shatter the target entirely. It’s only meant for throwing knives, but Simon doesn’t bother to point this out; it takes a second to smooth over the sting of Izzy, the complicated twist in his chest that he knows will have Clary, wherever she is, reaching for the rune that binds them.
“You did not complain when you were rolling around on the bottom of a boat with me,” Simon tells Jace instead.
“That wasn’t kissing,” Jace scoffs, “that was attempted manslaughter.”
“You were the one who was going to let me kill you,” Simon replies, like those words don’t still cling to his mind and his mouth more often than he’ll ever admit.
Jace shrugs, and walks over to wrench his blade out of the wall. “I was letting everyone have a go at that point,” he responds, tone light, mouth sharp.
Things have changed over the past few years, beyond what Simon could imagine even before he ended up dead and cursed and saved all in the same breath, but it’ll never be enough to wipe out what it was like to look into Jace’s eyes and see pure Hell staring straight back out.
Nowadays, he looks at Jace’s easy, beautiful, grins, and sometimes wonders if Jace wishes he had a parabatai rune that he could try and blame all of this on.)
-
“It’s a difficult thing to attempt,” Magnus says.
Since the parabatai ritual, Clary wasn’t aware that there was another part of her life people were figuring out for her and then giving advice, whether asked for or not.
“Is this you trying to change my hair colour again,” she asks, “because I already said no the first fifteen times.”
Magnus sighs, theatrical, and wiggles glittery fingertips. “Oh, Clary, the things I could do to your hair if you’d only let me. And no, I was actually referring to that little ménage à trois you’re clumsily trying to collate.”
Clary chokes on her tea, while Magnus stays looking serene.
“You’ve kissed both of them and they’ve shared bodily fluids already,” he adds, “there’s no need to look so violently horrified, sweetheart.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation,” Clary tells him, and then adds: “ever. Ever ever ever.”
Magnus rolls his eyes at her, old and young at once. He’s not tiptoeing around the thing; he’s stomping straight into it in his honest-to-god shimmery cowboy boots. Clary lives with Isabelle now, who doesn’t avoid something if she can whip it down and then put a stiletto through it, but even so, Isabelle’s letting this lie. Maybe it’s because of Simon and the bitter knot of emotions that still chokes Clary from time to time when she looks at Isabelle with Simon’s eyes, but Clary likes to think it’s because Isabelle is giving her time, or something like it.
“You’re ignoring the most important thing,” Magnus tells her, and Clary finds herself crossing her fingers that he’s not about to say anything that’s going to scar her memories forever. He tuts at her, as though he can tell what she’s thinking. “I can give you valuable advice. You try asking Luke about how to have two boyfriends.”
Clary does actually picture that, and then immediately regrets it. It’s bad enough, the idea that he and her mother might one day know that-
“Oh, sweetheart,” Magnus adds, “they already do. Everyone already knows.”
Shadowhunters: looking better in black than the widows of their enemies, and so goddamn gossipy, you wouldn’t believe.
-
Simon’s the sticking point in the end, his mouth on Clary’s until it isn’t.
“But I thought we’d fixed most of your crippling self-esteem issues!” Jace says. It might actually be a wail at this point. Simon raises an eyebrow and Jace adds: “well, not me, but people.”
Clary can’t read the flutter of emotions tugging at the bond between her and Simon, but his hand is still around her wrist.
He looks down at where he’s holding her, and then his fingers peel back. Clary could read his every thought even before they linked themselves together, but somehow things that have nothing to do with killing monsters have altered them in recent years, and now there’s a distance between them that might not be a distance at all.
“I became a Shadowhunter,” Simon says, “because I was alive, and because you were there, and we’ve already established I’d follow you anywhere, Clary.”
She wants to talk, but forces herself to stay quiet. She drives an elbow into Jace’s ribs so he won’t snip something about puppies or apron strings or anything else deliberately sour because Jace still ruins things if he isn’t completely sure how to have them.
“And now I’m just like everybody else who isn’t sensible enough to run from danger,” Simon carries on. He bites his lip, lets it go, and Clary is aware of watching it in a way she would once have laughed at herself for.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Jace’s voice is soft; more a placeholder of sarcasm than anything else, to keep a shred of normality unspooling here.
Simon smiles, and it splinter-twists as it goes. “It was the two of you who made me special,” he says, and holds up a hand before either of them can say anything. “Jace gave me his angelic blood and Clary gave me the Mark of Cain. Without them, I was just another Downworlder in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Not to me,” Clary says.
However she can or can’t define Simon, there’s always that: he’s never just been Simon. She watches the corners of his mouth flicker a little and thinks, well, at least he knows that much.
Jace mumbles something that’s probably obscene, and then shifts Clary to the left so he can kiss Simon. She wouldn’t need the sudden spark of shock that flees through her parabatai rune to see how a movement that Jace clearly signposted has startled them both; it runs through them both like strings, pulling them taut, but they don’t pull back either.
Her boys; stubborn and sudden and ridiculous to the last. To the first.
They both look a little electrocuted when they pull apart to breathe. “There,” Jace says, with finality. “You can’t be that ordinary; whatever everyone says, I don’t do that with just anyone.” He casts a sideways look at Clary, who finds herself biting into something that might be a laugh or a smile or just relief as it skins across her mouth. “Well, not anymore, anyway.”
Magnus told Clary that everyone should talk at some point, and she’d listened to him and then tossed the advice aside, because Simon and Jace can talk and talk and talk but to get them to actually say something that means anything is a whole other mountain Clary has no interest in climbing this early. Still, she can’t help musing, an actually frank conversation might have made everyone look a little less punched in the face right now.
“Okay,” Simon murmurs. “Hey, okay.” He manages to meet Jace’s eyes, and the boy Clary half-dragged through a ritual to tie them forever would have blushed, but this older, different, exactly the same Simon just grins wryly. “We already followed Jace to Hell and back, where can he lead us next?”
“I’m pretty sure about two-thirds of that wasn’t actually my fault,” Jace tells him, and: “oh, you have no idea,” and Clary clings to them both before they can do anything horrendous and ruin a perfect moment.
f: The Mortal Instruments
p: Clary/Jace/Simon
ch: rarepairfest for sandrine
r/wc: PG/3020
w: SPOILERS for City of Heavenly Fire
s: [Futurefic] She didn’t notice then; she thinks that she might now.
n: [Title from Snow Patrol's The Lightning Strike.] Technically I've got 10k of a Clary/Isabelle college AU on my laptop, but this is the first Mortal Instruments fic I've written that's made it to the internet, so, hooray! Really, if you haven't read City of Heavenly Fire, this will spoil the crap out of it for you.
In the pages of another sketchbook, this one a birthday present from Maryse, the cover inlaid with an angelic rune that thrums under her fingertips even through the heavy stock, Clary draws her life now. Their lives now, the lives they never thought they’d get, when adulthood was a joke destination on the other side of a knife blade.
Clary turned twenty-one last week. She can legally drink now, and she still has all of her fingers and toes, and hey, she isn’t dead. All three are small victories, even if Isabelle’s been mixing the cocktails for years and sometimes Clary feels like the only person not to have scrambled out of some kind of semi-literal grave in recent years.
(“Terribly maudlin, Clarissa,” Jace told her, spinning her under her birthday chandelier lights until her curls were alight with glitter, like this future was always theirs for the taking.)
So she draws pictures of the things that surround her: of Jace, who deals with chance by being awful about it, and of Simon, who deals with change by treating it like it isn’t happening, and of Isabelle and Magnus, knowing spectators who watch what Clary can’t even name with amusement tucked into their every expression.
“I thought I’d find you in here.” Jace, louche and barefoot and eternally honey-smirking, tapping on her doorframe too late, keeping up her illusion of privacy that she gave up a long time ago.
Clary slams her sketchbook closed, almost too fast, maybe trying to hide something from him that she can’t define yet, too fragile to be thought or spoken or touched.
“Been drawing me too accurately again?” Jace asks too mildly, tossing his hair. “I’ve told you that you’ll burn all our eyes out with my own natural brilliance.”
“How will I ever capture your modesty?” Clary responds, taking his offered hand on a laugh that doesn’t shiver, not quite.
The parabatai rune beneath her left collarbone twinges.
-
There was an argument that wasn’t an argument that went on for months, of course. Sometimes there was yelling and sometimes there were slammed doors or smashed crockery and way too much crying, really.
“No, it wasn’t this fraught when Jace and Alec decided,” Isabelle said, sighing, in response to the question Clary hadn’t actually asked her, “but boys are boys and it’s not like they told anyone until it was too late to really do anything about it.”
The discussion was spreading through the Institute by this point, out into the rest of the world. Clary found herself receiving emails from people she’d never heard of, late night transatlantic phone calls that were responses to things she hadn’t needed to say in the first place. Luke, after three consecutive coffee meetings where he just stared at his hands and mumbled and bent latte spoons into awkward shapes, wrote her a fifteen page letter. It said some things she’s not even sure he ever told her mom.
What was happening to Simon was probably worse.
“But what if I die?” he asked. They were supposed to be training and Isabelle had just swept his legs out from underneath him in an efficient fashion.
“Well.” Jace tipped his head, tapping a throwing knife against his lower lip. “You’ve already done that before.”
Simon pulled himself up from the floor to glare at him properly. “Whose side are you on? Because I was pretty sure this was one thing we actually agreed on, amongst a whole range of times of your opinions being horribly, awfully wrong.”
Jace’s grin widened into his favourite my haircut and a selection of my life choices are so much better than yours one, the one Clary finds attractive almost in spite of herself, but nobody else does.
“Of course,” he replied, “this is the worst idea anyone’s ever had-”
“Hey,” Clary interjected, because in the scheme of things this wasn’t even in the top ten, but Jace ignored her.
“-and that means that you and Clary are almost definitely going to go through with it at the earliest and least convenient opportunity, because that is what you do.”
Simon looked as though he was going to try and respond, but then he gave up in the face of what was unfortunately somewhat accurate.
“Yes,” Isabelle cut in, “because literally no one in here has ever done that before, with disastrous and now famous consequences.”
(Isabelle had given her a one-shouldered shrug when Clary inevitably turned to her for support. “Please,” she’d said, “I can’t think of anything worse.”
She left out the part where her options were thin on the ground, and Clary was kind enough not to bring it up.)
When making endless lists to show Simon (and by extension a loudly cynical Jace) about why she needed him to be her parabatai, Clary sometimes felt she should scratch out all the logical reasons, all the evidence she’d gathered from her research, and tell Simon the truth: that he already was, always had been, and the runes wouldn’t be telling anyone anything they didn’t already know.
-
There were points, years ago, when Clary thought that Simon would look the way he did forever. That same smile, and the eyes that weren’t completely human any more but wore the expressions they’d always worn. That he was frozen in time, trapped like one of her sketches, sweet sixteen and always a little murdered.
But Simon now isn’t Simon from five years ago; he’s broader and he laughs more and his skin is covered in the Marks that define them all now, and he’s different and the same and Clary’s more used to the constant flicker of him living in her head than maybe she should be. Jace and Alec talked about it, of course; that is to say Alec muttered and Jace lied through his teeth with airy hand gestures, and Clary sort of understood that she’d be able to sense Simon’s presence, his pain, perhaps. It’s different than that, though, and Clary finds something comforting in that, the ebb and flow of emotions and instincts that don’t always belong to her, that she can’t always define, but that feel at home anyway.
She supposes that they were always in and out of each other’s skin as children.
It’s Simon’s fingers around her wrist before battle, his lip tucked between his teeth, and sometimes she misses leaning forward to press his glasses up his nose with a finger, the hint of a flush in his cheeks. First vampirism fixed his sight, and then the rather more boring Lasik option fixed it the second time around; no one wants a smashed lens bringing their fighting to an abrupt close. His strength rune is bold and hot as it coils up against her skin, and she huffs a breath or two to fix it into place. Simon looks up at her when he’s done, teeth white in his grin, and Clary for a moment wonders where the little boy who couldn’t tie his laces has gone. She remembers, then, that he’s still part of her, with the Anne of Green Gables girl with her braids and her grazes and her mind held hostage by a spell she couldn’t have ever imagined.
“You’re worryingly introspective,” Simon remarks, stele packed away, witchlight glittering in his hand, “are you going to think emo poetry really really hard at whatever demons we find?”
“I’m going to read them some of that stuff you wrote when you were thirteen,” Clary replies, immediate, nudging his shoulder with hers. “About, what was it, a redhead named Mary?”
“I was very subtle,” Simon replies, even as he reaches for his dagger. There’s no movement yet; but there will be.
“You took out a couple of letters!” Clary points out.
“Yeah, and you didn’t notice,” Simon responds.
He looks good in gear, natural, flowing shadows and dark hair, and he still lines the walls of his new apartment with anime posters and drags the bemused Shadowhunters who grew up in Idris to whatever Marvel’s latest offering is. He’s Simon, and he’s not Simon.
“I didn’t,” Clary agrees, and grips her seraph blade as the darkness moves.
She didn’t notice then; she thinks that she might now.
-
Interlude: Simon
(Clary thinks that they don’t talk about it, but they do. Well, they talk around it enough that by the end of it it’s almost like they’ve had an actual conversation.
“I think Magnus is trying to offer me advice,” Simon says gloomily.
Alec goes on a lot of fancy vacations with Magnus; they send back alarmingly cute photos and Alec writes long emails about demons that he encountered and killed that are of interest only to Jace, who reads them avidly with popcorn. When he’s gone, Simon has somehow become Jace’s training partner; they’re both pretty sure that they’re not going to accidentally on purpose hurt each other. Nothing that an iratze can’t fix, anyway.
Jace is doing something complicated with a blade that looks very pretty and possibly turns your opponent into mincemeat, and possibly just looks flashy and is no actual practical use at all.
“Advice on what?” he asks, and then tips his head a little. “Advice on kissing boys?”
Simon doesn’t suffocate on his own breathing because while he’ll never exactly be cool he is a Shadowhunter now, and they don’t do things like that, so he says: “I was in a band.”
“And you never kissed the boys in it. Though you did live with Jordan. And you were kind of weird about Raphael.” Jace tips his head. “Should I be worried that they’re both dead?”
“You’ve been dead before,” Simon responds easily because well, who hasn’t, these days, and hits a bullseye with a throwing knife. “And hey, why isn’t Magnus giving you boy kissing advice?”
Jace stops twirling his blades around long enough to do a ridiculous hair toss that makes him look like he should be selling Herbal Essences. The way Simon’s stomach clenches has nothing to do with the way Clary feels whenever Jace looks at her, though sometimes he finds himself wishing it was just a stray handful of emotions that aren’t his. “Do I look like I need kissing advice?”
“You look like My First Vampire Slayer Barbie,” Simon responds, knowing already that it’ll go over Jace’s head, and adds: “also, screw you, I don’t need kissing advice.”
“You wear t-shirts with stuff written on them and you’re not dating Izzy anymore,” Jace says, smooth, and throws one of the blades hard enough to shatter the target entirely. It’s only meant for throwing knives, but Simon doesn’t bother to point this out; it takes a second to smooth over the sting of Izzy, the complicated twist in his chest that he knows will have Clary, wherever she is, reaching for the rune that binds them.
“You did not complain when you were rolling around on the bottom of a boat with me,” Simon tells Jace instead.
“That wasn’t kissing,” Jace scoffs, “that was attempted manslaughter.”
“You were the one who was going to let me kill you,” Simon replies, like those words don’t still cling to his mind and his mouth more often than he’ll ever admit.
Jace shrugs, and walks over to wrench his blade out of the wall. “I was letting everyone have a go at that point,” he responds, tone light, mouth sharp.
Things have changed over the past few years, beyond what Simon could imagine even before he ended up dead and cursed and saved all in the same breath, but it’ll never be enough to wipe out what it was like to look into Jace’s eyes and see pure Hell staring straight back out.
Nowadays, he looks at Jace’s easy, beautiful, grins, and sometimes wonders if Jace wishes he had a parabatai rune that he could try and blame all of this on.)
-
“It’s a difficult thing to attempt,” Magnus says.
Since the parabatai ritual, Clary wasn’t aware that there was another part of her life people were figuring out for her and then giving advice, whether asked for or not.
“Is this you trying to change my hair colour again,” she asks, “because I already said no the first fifteen times.”
Magnus sighs, theatrical, and wiggles glittery fingertips. “Oh, Clary, the things I could do to your hair if you’d only let me. And no, I was actually referring to that little ménage à trois you’re clumsily trying to collate.”
Clary chokes on her tea, while Magnus stays looking serene.
“You’ve kissed both of them and they’ve shared bodily fluids already,” he adds, “there’s no need to look so violently horrified, sweetheart.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation,” Clary tells him, and then adds: “ever. Ever ever ever.”
Magnus rolls his eyes at her, old and young at once. He’s not tiptoeing around the thing; he’s stomping straight into it in his honest-to-god shimmery cowboy boots. Clary lives with Isabelle now, who doesn’t avoid something if she can whip it down and then put a stiletto through it, but even so, Isabelle’s letting this lie. Maybe it’s because of Simon and the bitter knot of emotions that still chokes Clary from time to time when she looks at Isabelle with Simon’s eyes, but Clary likes to think it’s because Isabelle is giving her time, or something like it.
“You’re ignoring the most important thing,” Magnus tells her, and Clary finds herself crossing her fingers that he’s not about to say anything that’s going to scar her memories forever. He tuts at her, as though he can tell what she’s thinking. “I can give you valuable advice. You try asking Luke about how to have two boyfriends.”
Clary does actually picture that, and then immediately regrets it. It’s bad enough, the idea that he and her mother might one day know that-
“Oh, sweetheart,” Magnus adds, “they already do. Everyone already knows.”
Shadowhunters: looking better in black than the widows of their enemies, and so goddamn gossipy, you wouldn’t believe.
-
Simon’s the sticking point in the end, his mouth on Clary’s until it isn’t.
“But I thought we’d fixed most of your crippling self-esteem issues!” Jace says. It might actually be a wail at this point. Simon raises an eyebrow and Jace adds: “well, not me, but people.”
Clary can’t read the flutter of emotions tugging at the bond between her and Simon, but his hand is still around her wrist.
He looks down at where he’s holding her, and then his fingers peel back. Clary could read his every thought even before they linked themselves together, but somehow things that have nothing to do with killing monsters have altered them in recent years, and now there’s a distance between them that might not be a distance at all.
“I became a Shadowhunter,” Simon says, “because I was alive, and because you were there, and we’ve already established I’d follow you anywhere, Clary.”
She wants to talk, but forces herself to stay quiet. She drives an elbow into Jace’s ribs so he won’t snip something about puppies or apron strings or anything else deliberately sour because Jace still ruins things if he isn’t completely sure how to have them.
“And now I’m just like everybody else who isn’t sensible enough to run from danger,” Simon carries on. He bites his lip, lets it go, and Clary is aware of watching it in a way she would once have laughed at herself for.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Jace’s voice is soft; more a placeholder of sarcasm than anything else, to keep a shred of normality unspooling here.
Simon smiles, and it splinter-twists as it goes. “It was the two of you who made me special,” he says, and holds up a hand before either of them can say anything. “Jace gave me his angelic blood and Clary gave me the Mark of Cain. Without them, I was just another Downworlder in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Not to me,” Clary says.
However she can or can’t define Simon, there’s always that: he’s never just been Simon. She watches the corners of his mouth flicker a little and thinks, well, at least he knows that much.
Jace mumbles something that’s probably obscene, and then shifts Clary to the left so he can kiss Simon. She wouldn’t need the sudden spark of shock that flees through her parabatai rune to see how a movement that Jace clearly signposted has startled them both; it runs through them both like strings, pulling them taut, but they don’t pull back either.
Her boys; stubborn and sudden and ridiculous to the last. To the first.
They both look a little electrocuted when they pull apart to breathe. “There,” Jace says, with finality. “You can’t be that ordinary; whatever everyone says, I don’t do that with just anyone.” He casts a sideways look at Clary, who finds herself biting into something that might be a laugh or a smile or just relief as it skins across her mouth. “Well, not anymore, anyway.”
Magnus told Clary that everyone should talk at some point, and she’d listened to him and then tossed the advice aside, because Simon and Jace can talk and talk and talk but to get them to actually say something that means anything is a whole other mountain Clary has no interest in climbing this early. Still, she can’t help musing, an actually frank conversation might have made everyone look a little less punched in the face right now.
“Okay,” Simon murmurs. “Hey, okay.” He manages to meet Jace’s eyes, and the boy Clary half-dragged through a ritual to tie them forever would have blushed, but this older, different, exactly the same Simon just grins wryly. “We already followed Jace to Hell and back, where can he lead us next?”
“I’m pretty sure about two-thirds of that wasn’t actually my fault,” Jace tells him, and: “oh, you have no idea,” and Clary clings to them both before they can do anything horrendous and ruin a perfect moment.