Chapter Text
three.
I'll be gone so long before the anger comes // I'll be only what you've known of me 'til now
Alec had never been perfect, even if he would’ve loved to be.
Consequentially, he didn’t expect perfection out of anyone else either, least of all his siblings.
But in times like this he wondered if what little expectations he had of his siblings were maybe too much for them, and if maybe he should have lowered his standards. It would have been an insult to them, at least this was the way Alec had always seen it.
But he didn’t know what else to do.
And, maybe, the thing that was making his blood boil was the utter lack of shame in their faces.
Neither Izzy nor Jace were looking down, with hands behind their back and reddened cheeks, neither one of them seemed to feel even just a drop of guilt for what they’d done. They were standing in front of him- in front of the desk in the office that Alec had been using daily, ever since he’d turned of age more than a year before and became Acting Head of the Institute in every way that counted, if not officially.
And they were defying him.
Alec read that challenge in their relaxed stance, he’d read it in the way they’d strutted in, walking into the office, he saw it written in Izzy’s raised chin and the question hidden in her eyes- that silent “Why are you wasting our time?”, and Alec felt it as what little control he had left slipped through his fingers.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he asked, gripping the chair’s armrests with white knuckles, knowing that otherwise he would have slammed them on the desk hard enough to make the old wood shake and groan. When they didn’t answer he pushed. “So? You lost your tongues all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know what you wanna hear, Alec,” hissed Izzy, as her previous nonchalance, forgotten after his provocation, was replaced by bared teeth.
“No one else complained, Alec,” added his parabatai, a spark that Alec knew well in his amber eyes.
“Of course they didn’t,” he spat out, “Because they know very well who has to deal with your bullshit.”
He could feel his face twist with anger, but if in another situation he would’ve reigned it in, now he let it show because somehow Izzy got even more shameless as she took three steps towards him and opened her arms wide, pointing at the space around them.
“You’re the one who called us here- looks like you’re the one wasting time, brother. Stop blaming us like we’re the ones unable to admit that, sometimes, it’s ok to be wrong.”
For a short second Alec gaped at her in disbelief.
“Be wrong- I should admit that I’m wrong when Morgan could’ve been dead by now?”
“Morgan is perfectly fine.
“He could’ve died!”
The volume of his voice raised as he got up from his chair, and now the desk was the only thing between him and his sister. It didn’t matter that he was so much taller than Izzy when she tilted her head and met his eyes with twinning fire.
Jace stayed back, but it was enough to look at his face to understand who he was siding with,
“Morgan could’ve died,” he repeated, trying to calm down. “Had a demon killed him just because you two were too busy minding your own business to go out with him as you should’ve- his death would’ve been on you. Not on that demon, not on Morgan, on you.”
Jace finally spoke up, brows furrowed. “The radars showed little to no demon activity, Alec. Even you said that it would’ve been a calm night, you can’t blame us for listening to you.”
Alec brought a hand up to his hair, and he barely kept himself from tugging (again) at the already weak strands. “When have the radars ever been one hundred percent accurate in their revelations? You know that patrols are organized in a certain way for good reasons, I can do a lot more than blame you. I can blame you, because you abandoned and endangered a fellow Nephilim to go to a party-”
“Did Morgan come to you about it?” Izzy cut him out, her hands striking the air with her words. Alec’s hands stayed still, two tight, almost trembling fists. “Did Morgan file a complaint? Did Morgan say he felt unsafe? Or is this all you, making things more complicated than they really are? Forgive me if I can’t take you seriously, Alec, but I don’t have it in me to deal with your paranoia.”
“This time nothing happened. Are you happy, Izzy? I hope you are. What about next time?” he challenged her openly and walked around the desk. Izzy met him halfway, and neither one of them backed down. “When the radars will make you feel comfortable enough to do the same exact thing and someone will get hurt?”
“We’re not that stupid,” Jace started to heat up, and the parabatai rune pulsed.
Alec couldn’t keep in a chocked snort, as he was hit by the realization that things were about to go downhill very soon, but he felt like he was talking to two strangers.
“Tonight you were free- no patrol, no training- you couldn’t wait twenty-four hours. Am I supposed to trust your judgment when you couldn’t even wait one day? I have to deal with too many problems for you to act like this, Jace.”
And they knew what he was talking about- Max being taken away by their parents with no explanation, without giving Alec the chance to fight for his brother, their parents vanishing and unloading on them the responsibility of heading the Institute, the stress growing and growing-
Izzy stared straight into his eyes. “We can’t all do as you do, Alec.”
Jace tensed up. Alec saw him out of the corner of his eye get closer to Izzy, he heard him call her lowly, as if he knew what she was about to say. He made it just in time to grab her wrist to tug her out, away, far from- and she said what she wanted to say,
“We can’t all be something we aren’t. Some of us want to live.”
And Izzy, because Izzy knew how to hit where it hurt and twist the knife until there was nothing left but bloody strand of meat, twisted the knife one last time.
“And don’t worry about Max, he should be grateful mom and dad took him away. He won’t have to be raised by an asshole like you.”
Alec stared at her in silence, unable to do anything else.
Jace’s eyes had widened, and wordlessly he tugged Izzy out of the room, and in those second it took him to do so Alec stayed quiet. He didn’t move. He stood still, his feet glued to the cold pavement, even after they left.
There was always someone making noises in the Institute, but in that moment it was like the whole world had chosen to shut up just to make him hear Izzy’s words as much as possible, and to let them echo into his mind like thunder.
And- Alec sat down.
He took the last paper he’d been working on, left unfinished. A request to the Institute of Bangkok for a consult about a new cult that liked to boast about its Indonesian roots, just outside New York but under his jurisdiction. He read what he’d already written, and he picked up from there.
Izzy was fourteen years old. Just four months before she’d lost her parabatai, and Tuân had been refusing to meet with her ever since. She was stressed, she was tired, she was nervous, she was looking desperately for some sort of distraction. Said distraction had ended up being shady mundane clubs.
And a part of Alec was surprised that Jace had reigned in that reckless, wild side of his for so long. It was inevitable that he would try finding something dangerous to do, something that would free him from the burning wrongness that Alec had been feeling under his skin ever since they’d become parabatai, similar enough to Alec’s own that he couldn’t help but think that their souls had been made for each other.
Alec knew it, he knew it and he stayed at his desk writing reports and coordinating Nephilim and requesting new recruits for the new year and- and Izzy had been cruel, Izzy had told the truth, but Izzy and Jace had crossed the line.
They’d ditched a patrol to go partying, forcing Morgan to go out on his own: they’d chosen to do it, knowing that there was nothing worse for a Shadowhunter than abandoning their own. How could Alec, as their Commander, trust them?
He suddenly got up and the form he’d been signing fell on the ground. He started pacing, and let his fingers tighten around locks of dark hair and tug, ad he thought about Max, free and safe from Alec, far away from Alec- free from Alec like Izzy had never been. Izzy would’ve rather had Maryse and Robert take her away than grow up with Alec, and maybe Izzy didn’t really believe it.
But he knew Izzy, and when Izzy got angry she said the truth. Alec had laughed with Jace when she’d verbally destroyed boys and girls she couldn’t physically attack, saying all at once what she thought about them in bursts of cruelty and anger.
Was that what had just happened?
Alec inhaled deeply, and his lungs filled with air but he didn’t feel it.
“No, no,” he muttered to himself. If his mother were to see him now, pacing in her office, gasping for air, tugging his hair and talking to himself, she would’ve had him deruned. He repeated that short syllable until it lost meaning, and suddenly he stopped in his tracks.
He took a look at the office.
His mother used to do the same- she’d grip the chair’s armrests strong enough that Alec feared she would snap them in two. His mother would fight with her family and then sit down to keep working like nothing had happened. His mother would accuse and blame, always ready to remind the world about its inadequacy.
His hands started shaking.
The desk was half covered by papers, his phone lit up with a notification from Luke, the third message about a common case they were working on, the window was open and the air freezing. Alec hadn’t slept, he hadn’t eaten breakfast, and he’d just had the worst fight of his life with his siblings. Izzy’s parabatai was a werewolf now, their parents had taken Max away, Jace would barely sleep three hours in a row.
And- what was he doing?
Playing at being the leader, like he could really do it. Like he would ever be able-
He took a few more steps, feeling like he would fall down at any moment. He got to the desk.
He opened a drawer- the third at the bottom. He’d never opened it before because he knew what was inside. Every Head or Acting Head of an Institute knew where to go if they wanted to give up. If they admitted surrender, like Alec was about to do. He didn’t have it in himself to feel shame.
And it didn’t matter that Alec wasn’t officially the Head of the Institute, he’d been taking on his parents’ role for a long time and the Angel knew it, and the request for Free Choice wouldn’t burn if his stele touched it.
Alec found that simple sheet of thick, prized paper.
Laying under it, a photograph.
He blinked, still underwater, and took it out with trembling fingers.
And he saw his mother, twenty years younger, a smirk on her regal face. His father, beardless face and light eyes. Hodge, a strength in his straight spine that Alec had never seen before.
Stranger after stranger. A man with blonde hair, his grin painfully familiar, saluting like a mundane.
Luke. Luke Garroway, twenty years younger, his skin covered by ink-black runes. A red-headed woman at his side. At the centre, next to her, a boy that smiled at the camera like he knew something that the world would never find out.
He barely noticed it when his grip on the request for Free Choice weakened and it fell on the ground.
And Alec never picked it up again.
—
Everything started with a letter.
It wasn’t rare for Catarina to go through Ragnor’s never ending collection of drawers and trunks. They’d been friends for centuries, and Ragnor had always been a rather interesting and mysterious man, so she and Magnus, every fifty years or so, liked to amuse themselves by organizing treasure hunts into the obscure, unknown depths of the past of their dear teacher and friend, and the winner usually was the one who’d found the most curious-looking thing.
Catarina had won in 1742, when she’d found a spicy set of letters sent to Ragnor by an unknown woman- even though the spiciness had been one-sided judging from the courageous lady’s requests of “relaxing just for once”, and to “let go and embrace their passionate love”, and to “stop ignoring my letters, sweetness!”.
Not even thirty years had gone by since their last treasure hunt, but Catarina had still chosen to spend the weekend in her friend’s oldest and most loved residence- the one in Idris.
Which said a lot about Ragnor.
Sometimes she felt pity for him, who still held faith for the Nephilim race after centuries of cruelty, forever tied to the ones he’d loved.
Not like Magnus, who considered every decent Shadowhunter a precious, rare exception, because Ragnor had always said that their people had been ruined and corrupted by a few twisted individuals, and that it was also his duty to do what he could to fix that mistake, since he hadn’t had the guts to heal the infection when it started to manifest.
Catarina had only ever known Nephilims who were rotten to the bone, and the exceptions were few and the thought of them too painful. She didn’t have Ragnor’s hope, or his memories.
His home in Idris had been Ragnor’s chosen site of retirement and isolation.
He hadn’t quit all contact with the rest of the world, thankfully, but he’d limited it to a few trusted and asked for some years of peace and boredom, of time for himself, to reflect and, in a way, grieve and accept the loss he’d suffered when he’d left the Academy, and the work he’d dedicated his life to for more than a century.
(Catarina had never seen an immortal do the same work for more than three decades, before Ragnor.)
Catarina paid him a visit and the man welcomed her with less grumpiness than she’d thought, since she hadn’t even wasted time on warning, with tired eyes and not because he’d spend a few hours too many over his books.
Ragnor wasn’t the type to wallow in his sadness, spend his days in bed and stop looking after himself, and a stranger wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with him, but Catarina wasn’t a stranger: Ragnor was, possibly, the most controlled and neurotic individual she’d ever met, and he would’ve never let anyone see him without a gilet.
The visual proof of her friend’s worrying emotional state turned that weekend into a week, because Catarina believed in the power in isolation but not without limits, and she knew that sometimes it just didn’t work.
This wasn’t one of the cases where it would work, but if not even Magnus and Raphael together had managed to talk him into leaving Idris Catarina didn’t really think that she could have a chance. The only option was going to him, and being close to him in this dark times.
(A part of Catarina, that she pushed down until it became just a whisper from deep in her mind, was grateful for the pain that Ragnor was feeling now, because now the children of the Angel would never hurt him again.)
But after four days with him, Catarina left the guestroom that Ragnor had tidied up for her with a lazy flick of his wrists upon her showing up announced with a guilty smile stretching her blue lips, she took the stairs to get to the kitchen and make herself some good coffee, enjoy her routine, and in the silence of the large house she heard Ragnor’s laugh, a sound that wasn’t as rare as many would’ve thought seeing the old (a thirty-years-old-looking grandpa), serious, neat warlock, but that in the decades had become more uncommon than Magnus’ good choice in paramours.
She followed his laugh to the parlour, a wide room with creamy walls that seemed to light up under the light of the sun, that through two doors led either to Ragnor’s study, or the library.
(One of the libraries, since the floor above them, occupied by five bedrooms, welcomed also three libraries, another study and a few rooms filled with couches, furniture older than Ragnor and her dear friend’s large archives, that would’ve made any expert on history, philology, demonology, international literature, anthropology and maybe ten more subjects eat their hands from jealousy.)
Ragnor was sitting on a plush armchair in front of the unlit fireplace, his legs crossed and a red velvet slipper clad foot (she’d bet it was a gift from Raphael) kept swinging from side to side.
In one hand he held a porcelain tea cup, filled doubtlessly with one of the strange potions he liked to drink at breakfast (she refused to call it tea, and to think that he lived in both India and England for years), in the other a sheet of paper.
Good paper, she noticed, thick and creamy-white, and it was marked with the typical creases of a letter. And there it was, an empty envelope, abandoned on the bronze short table where he’d put a tray of biscuits to eat with his (poisonous) tea.
Her friend was shaking his head with a fond, slightly exasperated smile on his face, and he barely noticed her when she walked in,
“Take a biscuit, dear,” he told her, pointing at the still full plate with his teacup.
Catarina looked at the table, and she read the address of the letter’s recipient, the apartment in Soho whose mailbox was magically connected to any place in which Ragnor was residing at the moment (he didn’t want to always be warning everyone about his new addresses), and the sender’s, and the smile that had been forming on her lips froze.
For four years her dearest, oldest, most loved friend, Ragnor Fell, had resigned from his teaching role at the Shadowhunter Academy, but still the person that had sent him that letter (that was making Ragnor smile, as he uselessly tried to cover it with a green hand, as his eyes shone) came from the Institute of New York.
Four years had passed, since the day when Magnus put an arm around Catarina’s shoulders and told her that Ragnor was better off this way, that he’d been wasting his time on people who didn’t deserve him and would never appreciated him like they should’ve, and Catarina had thought that things would finally start to look up.
And yet.
She thanked God that Ragnor was looking down on his letter, and acted like she hadn’t noticed anything amiss. When she asked who was writing him, he answered “A young friend”, and Catarina gritted her teeth. But she stayed quiet, didn’t say another word about it, drank her coffee and the butter cookies Ragnor had made and went on with her day.
After dinner, when Ragnor retired to his suite to get ready for the night, she went to his study- the one in the lower floor, the one the older warlock used the most to her knowledge. Thanks to her treasure hunts with Magnus she’d become pretty familiar with the way Ragnor organized his many, many things (but god-forbid someone called him a hoarder, he’d jumped Magnus the last time). Even if he re-organized them before every hunt to make their lives harder, he hadn’t been ready for Caterina’s snooping, and it only took her five minutes to find the letter from that morning.
The letter, in a little ash wooden box, and with it tens more, all coming from the same address, all the same thick paper. The same ink, a darker shade of blue that looked familiar.
But there was something else in the envelopes. She opened one of them, sent the year before in June, and she found a photograph.
It was folded in two, and she ran a finger over the middle to see it fully.
It was the photo of a girl- a young teenager, with a head full of long hair, one of the darkest shades she’d ever seen, slightly curly and shining and beautiful, and two equally dark eyes that smiled together with her lips at the camera. She was sitting on a marble floor, her skin was glistening from the sweat covering her, and the toddler on her lap was staring at the whip wrapped around her feet, the adamas dark and unforgiving even through the lenses.
The toddler had the same hair, and his cheeks were red and full.
It was a… personal photograph.
A family photo, she thought, looking at the two Nephilims (the girl’s Runes left no space for doubt), and the one shooting must had been their parent.
She took out the letter.
“Ragnor,” she read, “you were right. I think I’ve just lost any hope of living a peaceful life. Izzy has made up her mind that a whip is the only weapon ‘cool’ enough for a girl as talented and beautiful as herself, and I’m afraid she wants to learn how to use it while wearing heels like the woman from that mundane movie she saw last month. She’s being turned into a monster. Max loves to use the whip as his personal chewing toy, he probably wants to eat it like candy. The last manual you sent me almost fell victim to his teeth, but be reassured- he was stopped, and you have to thank Jace, who-”
Catarina read the remaining lines of text, signed with a short but elegant “Alec”, then she folded both letter and photo to put them back into its envelope.
She took out another. There weren’t any photos, and it dated back to last month.
It didn’t start with “Ragnor,” at the head of the page.
A simple “Max won’t be the star of my letters anymore” was enough for her to put it away, understanding that it was best not to go on. Not when the letters had turned shaky, and too different from the elegant writing of the previous one, to show anything but a pain too deep for Catarina to snoop and poke around.
It was probably an ex-student, old enough to be at the Academy during Ragnor’s last years as a teacher, but also old enough to have a teenage daughter.
Unless he’d had her as a kid, he’d been one of the Nephilim from the Circle generation. But he hadn’t been a member of it, or he wouldn’t have been sending Ragnor letters about his son’s worrying eating habits and borrowed books.
Those weren’t formal letter. They were no different from the ones that Catarina exchanged with Tessa when she felt too nostalgic to use her phone. They were worldly, friendly, simple letters.
Letters that seemed to keep his friend’s spirit up, not ruin it.
That was enough for Catarina.
She powered down her phone, and Magnus’ contact number disappeared. She’d been ready to call him, ready for an emergency intervention, but that wasn’t the case.
It wasn’t a pleasing situation, for sure, Catarina could feel a deep hatred burn in her guts every time she thought about that school and those damned little soldiers that sent their brats there to study and suck the energy out of a soul as kind as Ragnor’s. But butting in would've been an invasion of privacy too big even for Ragnor, who was naturally reserved.
So she put the letter, with the photo of the young Nephilims who would one day become blood-thirsty Shadowhunters, away, back in their little box, and she left her friend’s study.
She didn’t tell Magnus. She told Raphael after two weeks, but Magnus didn’t need to know, in order to avoid the inevitable whining about her playing favourites.
—
Catarina answered to her phone, even though she didn’t know who was calling, and talked with Santana, even though she didn’t know who she was, or how she’d gotten that number. Her only consolation was that it was her private work number, not the personal one that only twelve people in the whole wide world had.
When the woman on the other side of the phone asked after Catarina Loss, a medically experienced warlock, because she needed help with her new packmate’s first full moon, Catarina didn’t hesitate to accept.
When Santana, the mysterious werewolf, added that the young girl was a Nephilim- or that she had been, at least, Catarina ran. A werewolf’s first transformation never hurt as much as it did for a Nephilim.
Santana was a- visibly stressed- woman in her thirties who looked like she hadn’t slept a wink in the last month, and she led Catarina into a very welcoming red-brick house.
She’d been waiting for her on the sidewalk, and the door was opened for them by a woman in a matching grey set of bonnet and sleeping robe. She crossed her arms but the wind still uncovered her legs and made her shiver, and she was quick to push them inside and close the door behind them.
She greeted Catarina with a curt “Hello,” and then she loudly called out a name: Bat, the tall, dark-skinned boy who suddenly appeared, slamming another door open hard enough to leave a small crack on the wall- but the woman who was probably his mother didn’t even react.
“Luke isn’t answering,” he said, worriedly looking at every angel of the entrance, probably hoping from ‘Luke’ to shout “Surprise!” and walk in to save the day. If he was talking about that Luke, the one that Catarina was thinking about, than she could understand his agitation.
“Warlock Loss is here, at least,” Santana reassured him, her eyes to expressive to hide just how scared she was to hear what the boy had to say.
“The girl?” Catarina asked.
“They’re taking her here. Follow me.”
They went to the basement, walking through the door that Bat had slammed with such strength just a minute before: it was wide, well-illuminated and the shelves full of old cardboard boxes had been pushed to the sides of the room, leaving enough room for a whole young werewolf.
Catarina didn’t know if it was wise to let the girl turn into the basement of a common house, but she didn’t ask. She was older than Santana and a lot older than Bat, whose boyhood became more obvious with every panicked move and expression he made, but she wasn’t a werewolf, and the tension was high enough. They didn’t need a random warlock judging their decisions.
“She was bitten a week ago, so the effects of the transformation have already started, but the infection has been spreading very slowly. The full moon will finish the job,” Bat explained as he played with (tortured) his hands, “I didn’t know a transformation could take so long and be so painful.”
“Lycanthopy is an infection that will basically eat away her angelic blood. We could compare the process that she’s about go through to a parasite that devours its host from the insides out, until nothing’s left but the parasite itself. Not to talk about the biological and physical differences between a mundane and a Nephilim, that will make this only more difficult.”
It was a given that the bedtime horror stories about the big bad wolves that the Nephilims liked to tell their children were horrifying, but there was some truth at the base of their fear- it wasn’t completely unjustified, to be fair. Manipulated to satisfy the racist ideals of a rotten society, sure, but never unfounded.
Bat had become a little pale. Two of the people in the room were werewolves who would’ve heard a pin drop a mile from his house, but he still turned on his phone to check if he’d received any message or call that they hadn’t noticed.
Then his mother called out his name, again, and Santana managed to open the door to the basement just in time for three new people to run down the stairs, and then the light coming from the room’s single, sad but strong light bulb hit the newcomers, shone on the adamas blades on their backs and her hands flexed and rose, the blue trails of her magic waking up under her skin.
The first, holding an apparently lifeless body, knelt on the ground, as the third person turned and looked at them, long black curls whipping with the movement of her head to show a familiar face.
The Shadowhunter was young, barely a girl, but the V-neck of the t-shirt she was wearing revealed the Enkeli rune marked into the skin of her chest, its end disappearing between her breasts. Her forehead was shining from the physical exertion, and her dark eyes got fixed for a second on Catarina and her hands, before they moved to Santana.
“I don’t know what’s happening to her, but you need to do something.”
Catarina then heard low whines of pain coming from one of the strangers on the ground, and she didn’t hesitate. Throwing herself on the cold pavement, she finally saw the origin of said whines.
It was another young girl, and if the other looked slightly tired this one was positively drenched in sweat, and too pale, her cheeks feverishly reddened and her almond-shaped eyes hooded.
Her face was wet with tears, the tracks they’d made visible even now that the tears had stopped falling because of the probable dehydration, and sounds of pain kept leaving her open mouth.
She put a hand to her clammy forehead, and the girl’s eyes opened slightly. It was a good sign, at least.
“Who ‘r’ -?” she tried to ask, the broken words leaving place to a strangled gasp. She gritted her teeth, trying to keep it in in a show of sudden pride.
The blue light of Catarina’s magic started to spread over her skin, emanating dim flashes that reflected against every shiny surface in the room.
“I’m Catarina Loss, you can call me Cat.” Her lips flattened, feeling everything but happiness for what she was learning with every second. “I’m here to help you out and make this less dangerous for you. What’s your name?”
"T'n" she whispered, her voice too weak.
"Tuân," repeated the third and last Shadowhunter, a young man who closely resembled the black-haired girl. He was kneeling next to Tuân, but he’d shuffled away to make space for Catarina.
“Tuân, a beautiful name. How are you feeling, Tuân?”
“N’t so go’.”
“You’ll feel better soon, love,” the word slipped from her mouth, pushed by every crushing wave of pain she could see hitting the fragile body of the Nephilim. Catarina’s magic had swam down into her veins and arteries, and every sensation was data, energy and matter that she could feel acting over the young one. It was excruciating, and necessary.
Maybe a few minutes went by, Bat’s mother- “Call me Marla, doc”- got a pillow under her knees, making her notice how much they’d started hurting, but she didn’t stop.
It was her first personally assisting a Nephilim in their first transformation, but she knew what to do. So she didn’t stop, letting her own magic curl around the demonic energy spreading through the girl’s blood and lymphatic vessels, did her best to limit the damage, repaired fractures and put muscles back together as they got torn apart, before the pain could truly register in Tuân‘s brain.
She made her fall asleep, so that she wouldn’t hear what Catarina had to say. She raised her head to look at the other people in the room, a pained grimace on her face. Her glamour had long since dropped, and strands of white hair were falling over her eyes.
“I could shorten the time it will take her to transform, but as long as the Enkeli is there there’s little I can do. The best thing we can do is wait for the infection to act on and erase the other runes, and then I’ll be able to make it last no longer than an hour.”
The girl, familiar and terrified, nodded and sent her an anxious look-
“We can stay, right? How long is it gonna take?”
Catarina blinked, startled. But when a horse had a gift in its mouth…
“Maybe half an hour. No more than fifty minutes. I can lessen the pain, at least a little.” Her eyes hardened. “It won’t be easy, nor pretty. You can stay with her, but only if you’ll be able to behave.”
The girl nodded, just as serious.
Bat’s phone ringed, and at his “Luke’s coming” everyone sighed, the relief palpable. The girl got down on her knees, close enough to Catarina that she could smell the blood on her, just in time for Tuân to wake up. She didn’t move, but she started to struggle with every breath.
Only three runes were left on her body, Catarina could almost hear them screaming in pain through the bond that now kept her connected to her patient. The only one she could see was on her wrist, and the skin was so irritated that she could barely distinguish the dark lines of what looked would’ve looked like ink, if only Nephilim runes hadn’t had their own strange, shining three-dimensionality.
“Hey, Tun-Tun, you hear me?” the Nephilim asked, voice calm.
“Iz’y,” Tuân called her. Izzy smiled. She was good at pretending to not be worried sick.
Catarina remembered a letter and a photo, a girl named Izzy, her whip and her little brother, and she stopped being surprised at the sight of the girl being so kind towards a turning werewolf.
“I’m here. The doctor says it’s gonna take a while, but then you’ll be as good as new.”
“New,” the other echoed, and Izzy’s smile twisted into a grimace that she hid quick enough to make it look like some sort of hallucination.
“New, sister mine.”
That title was dripping affection, a feeling as intense as it was desperate.
“May th’ Ang’l be w’h…” she couldn’t finish the sure-to-be-devastating sentence, as a new wave of tears fell down her cheeks, and Izzy didn’t hesitate to wipe them away with her thumbs, caressing her face and whispering comforting nothings into her hear.
“Yeah, Tun, you’ll rest and be stronger and know lots of cute guys, and you’re gonna give ‘em my number because I’m the only one old enough to date guys.”
The choked thing that escaped form the girl’s lips was an exhausted attempt at a laugh, and at her “A year is- is nothin’, it do’snt, change-” Izzy smiled, bright and burning, fully understanding the girl’s words. The girl she’d called sister. Catarina didn’t attempt to hide her own smile.
The young man, the Shadowhunter that had come with Izzy and Tuân there, at Bat’s house, didn’t smile. He crossed his arms, his expression harsh. “Neither one of you is old enough to date.”
Izzy turned to give him a grin with red tinted lips.
“Oh, really?” She shook her head, looking down at Tuân again. “Don’t listen to him, or we’ll still be virgins at thirty.”
The tears hadn’t stopped, but the Tuân was calmer.
Bat slowly got closer, his eyes on Tuân as Izzy kept distracting her, talking about some nightclub Catarina had never heard of, but he talked to the Shadowhunter.
“How is she, really?”
The Shadowhunter got up without getting noticed by the two girls, and he got close enough to Bat that Catarina struggled to hear his words.
“Not well."
Bat scoffed, but didn’t move a muscle to get away. He leaned in, with all the confidence in the world. “You don’t say. I bet she believes some fucked up shit, like that she’s gonna get punished by your pretty Angel or that she’s gonna have to kill herself to atone.”
“Her father did publicly ask her to spare him the shame and commit suicide before the full moon, if you really want to know.”
Bat swore, and looked at the other with such disgust that Catarina was surprised to see the utter lack of anger or worry in the Shadowhunter’s eyes.
“Jesus, it’s like watching a movie about the crusades with your lot. Or about conversion therapy.”
“I didn’t know they made movies about that.”
“Alec,” Izzy called out, voice urgent. The young man, Alec, got to her before Catarina could blink. Catarina didn’t need Izzy to explain, because eavesdropping on the two young men hadn’t distracted her from the slow course of the venom in Tuân’s veins, hadn’t kept her from feeling it.
In cases like this one, it was as if she was feeling the same sensations as her patients, without the debilitating pain that afflicted them. A failing empathy, that kept her from sleeping on the worst night.
Tuân suddenly screamed, her back arched, and another rune disappeared from her skin.
The port slammed open and Luke Garroway barged into the basement just when Tuân slumped like a wireless puppet with one last groan, and Catarina closed her eyes, feeling as if she had the girl's heart in her hands as she sent a wave of electricity through the impossibly still muscle. She chose on the spot not to tell anyone about how the girl's heart had almost given out, focusing on guiding the muscle through another beat.
“How far along is she?” Garroway, his voice low and shaken, and Catarina heard him walk slowly towards them, as if he knew that the sight would break him.
“The Enkeli. And her- her Parabatai rune.”
The man fell on his knees next to her, and she turned to look at him for a second, a second was enough to reveal to her eyes the anguish that was bleeding into the man’s dark eyes, like the overflowing edges of a river flooding a valley. She focused on the girl, on her sweat-covered skin, on the terrible smell that was lifting off it- a mixture of blood and rot that made her want to vomit. She would have, if she hadn't had decades of experience at her back.
Bat whispered “Her heart was about to…”
Catarina cursed. The boy was finally being hit by the ugliness of their situation, by the violence of the infection as it burned in her veins like infernal fire, by how her body kept breaking and stitching itself back together, and she could imagine how terrible the sound must have been- the heart of a healthy girl suddenly failing at its job, trying to give up.
“She won’t die,” Catarina reassured him, “Not today.”
Tuân was looking at her. Her eyes were far away, and she was struggling to focus on her. But her lips twitched in a weak attempt at a smile. Even if she was far from being fully conscious, or happy, she tried to smile at her.
Catarina swore to take her out for breakfast at least a few times, as soon as she could. She looked like a good girl.
She smiled back, and got ready for the ugliest part.
“Her parabatai. Where are they.”
“I’m here,” Izzy answered, ignoring the rest of them, her eyes stuck on her sister in arms
Catarina had never cared much for Shadowhunters. She’d never found them as interesting as Magnus or Ragnor said they were, and even if there had been a few exceptions- well, Ephraim had been different.
She hadn’t personally known many of them, not really, and she understood the intensity of a parabatai bond in a very abstract way. She knew they were serious, a lot serious, serious enough to force to banishment Magnus’ smile every time they were referenced to, and she’d heard the rumors. The death of a parabatai was usually closely followed to the death of the one they were bound to.
But Tuân wasn’t dying. She prayed it would be enough.
Considering that Garroway had had a parabatai, before becoming a wolf, and that said parabatai was a monster to blame for his turning, and that she was pretty sure said monster hadn’t held his hand as his body was torn from the insides out, Catarina would understand why he looked like that.
Why he looked at Izzy like he was seeing a ghost.
Tuân looked at her.
“You’re…” she jolted, bringing her hands up to her stomach.
And Catarina felt it.
A rune that until then hadn’t felt any different from the others, that was now clinging to the girl’s body with the stubbornness of a toddler, that would’ve made her laugh if it hadn’t been for the demonic energy that, one after the other, was cutting away every stitch that kept it attached to Tuân’s soul. Cruelly snapping the thread away, getting stronger with every cut.
Catarina felt the energy of the rune spreading through her weakening body in one last, useless attempt at survival.
The end was close, she could feel it.
Her eyes started to get wet, and she snapped them close to keep the tears at bay. She didn’t want to worry Tuân. But she would need a drink, once it was all done.
And so, the rune’s heartbeat became faster.
The girl started sobbing, exhausted, and Izzy’s hand went to her cheek, rubbing it sweetly. The young man got closer, and Catarina felt like she was intruding a private moment.
Two foreheads touched.
“How- how, it hurts, it hurts-” Tuân gasped, moaning in pain.
“Shhh, it’s almost- you basically made it, Tun-Tun, look at me.”
Tuân shook her head.
“No, don’-”
The Shadowhunter took her hand between his, and didn’t let go.
Not even when the first shout left her lips, and her iron grip tightened painfully, not even when the sound of broken bones filled the room. The Shadowhunter didn’t bat an eye.
Catarina felt tiredness weight on her, but she didn’t stop.
Bat kept moving, bringing them fresh water and cloths for Izzy to clean off the sweat from Tuân’s skin, again and again, while Santana stood back, near the stairs, her back against the wall as she stared unflinching at the young girl. Garroway looked like every breath was painful to his lungs.
One of the edged of the parabatai rune started to fade out, and Tuân’s mouth opened in a silent whine, made mute by her own pain.
She said something, or tried to. The two Shadowhunters got closer, but then even Catarina managed to hear Tuân, whose eyes were now wide open, gaze fixed on the other girl.
Her face twisted by pain.
“Izzy, Iz’, I can’t, Isa’le, where-”
The man- almost a boy- tried to calm her down, pushing away her bangs that had flattened and got stuck on her forehead, soft and kind like a parent tucking their kid to sleep.
“Don’t speak, Tuân. Let it go.”
“Co’nder-” in a show of sudden strength she dropped the hand of her 'Commander', that fell on the ground with a cracking sound of bones and still his face stayed motionless, to tug at his shirt until her fingers turned pale. She used the leverage to try and get up, and pushed herself against Isabelle.
“Let it go, Tuân,” he repeated, and Catarina didn’t even try telling him to stop: she let him circle his broken fingers around Tuân’s hands, thinking that a few fractures were nothing compared to what was happening to the girl. He worked to get her fingers off his shirt, and guided the girl back down. She was too weak to resist him. “Let it go, we’re here with you.”
She cried again, and Izzy- face wet with tears- echoed what had to be her brother. She took her face between her hands, and twisted her back until her own was hidden in the juncture between Tuân’s shoulder and neck. Through the pain and agony, Tuân struggled to put her chin on her head, but she did it.
“I’m here, Tun, as always. I never left you alone, I’m not gonna start now.”
“Izzy- I’m, sorry, sor’, I- please, fo’giv’ me.”
“No, no, I’m here, don’t worry-”
The last thread was snapped, and Tuân screamed.
She screamed until her voice broke, and she wasn’t given a second of reprieve that Catarina felt like a hole was opening up in her chest, as rivers of pain and bloodied suffering cascaded down her body, because the Enkeli was now the only rune left on her body.
The Enkeli was the first rune to ever touch the Nephilim’s young skin, the most important rune that their Angels had given their race, was pulsing. With every second it grew more desperate and frantic.
The Enkeli would fight- the angelic power of the girl, tied to her soul, would fight as long as it could to stay with her, no matter how much it hurt. That energy, made of pure light, that was fighting like a parent keeping close to their chest the corpse of their child, would lose.
And it lost, and this time Tuân’s heart stopped.
Catarina let her magic dip into Tuân’s heart and she set it on fire.
It contracted and it was painful, but it did. And Catarina counted the beats she was forcing it to go through until she was sure it could go on on its own, letting it go. She sighed in relief, and forced the girl to stay unconscious as her bones changed shape and her body transformed.
She heard the other wolves leave the room. Catarina raised her head and opened the eyes she’d closed as she kept Tuân alive, and saw the full moon shine in the sky.
She lowered her eyes on the wolf, small and sleeping, and the girl.
Isabelle.
She had her arms around the animal’s neck, her face hidden in her thick fur. It was light, unlike Tuân’s hair. She was whispering something under her breath.
“-’d where thou lodgest, I will lodge, thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God, where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be-”
Catarina looked away.
She spent the night in that basement, busy keeping Tuân unconscious, knowing that if she woke up she would lose control with no hope of being able to control herself.
Isabelle wouldn't let her go. The Commander watched over them, kneeling, his back straight, a hand on Izzy's back.
Warm tears fell on thick fur, disappeared from the sight of the world.
But Catarina would never forget the inexorable snap of a bond as intense as the spirit of a living being being broken.
—