Chapter Text
Cos I don't know how to link in the notes, here ya go: betas simonsfangs and maiarobers
Part I
Ah, whatever goes around eventually comes back to you. So you gotta be careful, baby, and look both ways before you cross my mind. — Bootsy Collins
A Dive Bar
The night had been a lonely and long one.
Unable to sleep, Raphael Santiago had tossed and turned in his bed, willing the digits on his alarm clock to change and announce sunset’s arrival. With hours of time to think and no one to share them with, he grew bored and sat up somewhere around three thirty in the afternoon. The sun would still be up for a while, an hour at least. On his nightstand lay an old copy of Across the River and Into the Trees by Hemingway, but by page thirty five, the book depressed him and he tossed it aside. Sighing deeply, he got out of bed, drank a glass of water, and stopped in front of a shelf full of books, some copies more battered than the others. It had been a long time since he’d bought any new books. Old books smelled of their past, and sometimes he occupied himself by concentrating on the scent and attempting to decipher as much as he could about its previous owner. It was a game he played to keep his senses in working order. Even vampires get lazy if they stopped exercising.
Raphael stood in front of the shelf and settled on La ciudad de las bestias. The novel was hardly old, but he’d bought in second hand. As a rule, he never bought shiny new books, which were disappointing, as they smelled of nothing but artificial toner and glue.
After another hour of dissatisfactory and distracted reading passed – he reread passages he had no memory of absorbing. He put the book on the growing pile next to his bed, all discarded novels and novellas he couldn’t focus on.
He showered and put on some decent clothes, descended the stairs and shared ‘breakfast’ with Lily Chen and Stan Vakros, two other vampires residing in the hotel. When they finished, he cleaned the kitchen in a mechanical manner, scrubbing at the stove they rarely used, sweeping the floor with a broom, neatly cleaning the countertops and washing the cups they’d used. When there was nothing left to do, he watched the news and checked in with Magnus to hear if any complications or problems had arisen with the shadowhunters or fellow downworlders. Nothing. No news. All was quiet.
All was quiet in the hotel, too. It irked him. Was there nothing to do around here?
The antique clock in the downtrodden lobby declared eleven p.m. with slow even gongs. Time passed in a confusing mix of painstakingly slow or confusingly quick, as if he didn’t understand where the hours went and what he filled them with – how time pass when he barely did anything?
Raphael exited 116th East Harlem, the ruined and abandoned Hotel Dumort, and walked along the streets of the neighbourhood. The wind of the January winter was icy and harsh, even for a vampire. The temperature had dropped increasingly in the past few days, becoming glacial and even forcing beings such as himself to revert to overcoats and shawls. Humans covered their heads in hats and ear warmers, wore mittens and leather gloves, put on layer after layer to fight off the cold.
Raphael had, on this rare occasion, left aside his stylish jackets and had opted for something to keep him warm, instead of lukewarm. The wool itched at his throat. As to not garner unwanted attention from a passer-by observing the people on the street, he lit a cigarette and blew out the occasional breath to pretend he was human. It vaporized before him and turned into a white puff of smoke.
He turned the corner at a closed drugstore and followed the scent he’d caught a few minutes ago. When he’d first sniffed out Simon Lewis on his late-night promenade, he’d grown quickly bothered, remembering their last conversation. The interaction had become strangely uncomfortable when Lewis had blurted out that he couldn’t understand how Raphael could have ever refused a kiss from the Isabelle Lightwood, goddess walking, and that surely he must have been asexual or just an idiot – Simon spoke in italics. This statement baffled Raphael for many reasons. First of all, what did this brat know of his relationship with Isabelle? Secondly, how dare he presume to know anything? Raphael had ignored the question entirely, walking ahead in the Institute without directing another glance at Simon.
Why did this bother him so?
Young people – he did not consider himself to be part of this group, and had not for a long time – would be quick to label him asexual, but if he was being honest, the label held no appeal to him. Humans hungered for precision and establishing rules and stamping a tag on each and every thing, but the term asexual rang untrue to his ears. Was he without sex? Did he never experience sexual attraction? Questions such as these had long ago ceased to occupy his thoughts. Yet, for some reason, Simon’s words got on his nerves. Everything about Simon vexed him, usually.
Raphael tightened his coat around him and trampled the cigarette butt underneath his leather dress shoes. He followed the scent he’d caught earlier and paused in front of a small dive bar. The windows were greasy and dusty, decorated by fairy lights and candles. A smell of beer and stale sweat wafted from the door. If he focused, he could hear Simon inside, probably attempting to chat up some girl. He sighed as he remembered the long-time promise he’d made to the red-headed shadowhunter, Miss Fairchild. He’d promised to look after this goon, and now seemed like one of those times the promise came into effect. No other familiar scent accompanied him, so he was alone, or at least without his friends.
From inside came strange music, with interweaving guitars and hypnotic vocals mixed with gritty stereo noise. When he opened the door, his eyes immediately zeroed in on the slumped figure sitting on a bar stool, sipping a large container of blood. Simon had not noticed the glacial air streaming in from the door, as he was well beyond inebriated, and seemed to be talking to his cup instead of a girl, as Raphael had first thought.
Raphael ordered a glass of B negative and sat down in the far left corner.
He kept an eye on the daylighter and rolled his eyes when he realized it was already past one a.m., which meant that he’d been in the bar for over an hour and Simon had done nothing but drink more alcohol-infused blood and talk intermittently with the bartender about Black Panther, Simon’s latest object of obsession, if the long, detailed but uncoordinated analysis was anything to go by. Raphael wanted to roll his eyes. Superheroes were the absolute last thing on his list of interests.
The bar was called The Lone Dove, a rusty Irish pub, and though it was not known as a typical downworlder bar, such as the Hunter’s Moon, there were enough downworlders mixed with humans to know that a brawl wouldn’t be solved with a snap of the fingers – or a trick of encanto. This worried Raphael as he saw two vampires of a neighbouring clan in Brooklyn approach Simon and start needling him, coaxing him to explain how his daylighter powers worked. The two men were loud and rowdy, built like trees and bulky in appearance. True, Raphael was in awe of these daylighter powers as well, but he had enough pride to not snivel and beg for the secret behind the daylight shining on Simon’s skin without burning. He had long since come to peace with his life in the dark, and in fact revelled in it. He disliked humans and did not want anything to do with them. God forbid, with shadowhunters.
The two shady vampires now poked at Simon, who batted at their hands as if they were irritating flies, not fang-wielding creatures with notably short tempers and a tendency towards greed, especially when they were young. Raphael had already passed the age.
He slurred, shouting at them to leave him alone. “I’m drunk and I’m tired!”
The men laughed and continued to bother him.
Simon groaned and put a hand to his head, attempting to speak calmly, “Seriously, it’s not my night, please go away.”
They didn’t listen, of course, and the bartender was too occupied with another patron to notice the quarrel. It seemed now was the moment to intervene.
“Gentlemen,” Raphael cut in. “It’s high time we wrap this up, don’t you think?”
“Raphael! Amigo!” Simon shouted into his ear.
Raphael grimaced and returned his attention to the two men, who, after realizing whom they were talking to, took on the appearance of properly chastised children and slunk away with an apologetic grin full of mismatching teeth.
Simon had already refocused his attention elsewhere. He cut a particularly drab figure, sitting there perched on his seat and staring sadly into his empty cup. “Well,” he murmured. “I guess, thanks?”
“You don’t have to guess, just say thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
When chatter mouth Simon didn’t add anything to the conversation, Raphael sat down on the empty bar stool next to him, and did his duty to ask what was wrong.
“Nothing.”
Simon looked terribly sad. Raphael forced himself not to sigh and asked instead, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
Simon sounded like a child. What else could one expect from a nineteen year-old recently turned vampire? He was probably just hormonal. Raphael went back to his earlier table and picked up the empty cup, returning to the bar and asking for a refill. He cut off Simon, who’d clearly already had enough. He noticed Simon drumming his fingers along slowly with the tune coming from the music speakers, and they started a hesitant conversation about music preferences. Unsurprisingly, every band Simon mentioned was completely unknown to Raphael, and vice versa. Perhaps it was a generational thing.
To his astonishment, time went by fairly quickly and the last round bell rang before their conversation dried up. Simon was clingy when he was drunk and needed someone to hold onto when he stood up. Raphael begrudgingly accepted this task, even though he did not enjoy having Simon pet his arm.
What happened next, he would not be able to rationalize, not even years into the future. Sometimes things just happen, and you have no true control over them – even this explanation felt like an unknown and halfhearted lie. Either way, in those minutes after they left the bar, it seemed easy for Raphael to let Simon do what he wanted. That in itself was strange. Raphael did not let other people make choices for him. Afterwards, he would wonder what he was to Simon —distraction, end game, buyer’s choice? He’d promised he would look after the clan’s fledgling, but that didn’t make him a guide or a mentor.
So how did they end up pressed against one another in a dirty alleyway somewhere in the middle of the city at night?
How had Simon decided in the span of a few seconds that Raphael’s lips looked soft to the touch, and that he’d wanted to test this budding theory?
Raphael felt shocked at first. He didn’t kiss people often, and if he did, it was mostly because of a mirror effect: he was only interested in the act, because he enjoyed feeling the effect it had on other people. The initiation had been all Simon. And Raphael … well, he got high on the feeling of someone else’s feelings of happiness and exhilaration, though he rarely experienced the necessity to initiate this type of physical intimacy.
Raphael scarcely knew what to think with these eager lips pushed insistently against his. Isabelle had been slow in her proceedings, leaving him enough space to protest. Thinking of her in a romantic manner was alien and felt distinctly unwanted. Simon blindsided him and just as he felt Simon stiffen, embarrassment coursing through his inexperienced veins at the thought of rejection, Raphael’s lips acted on their own volition and he reacted aggressively to Simon’s lively desperation.
“I like this,” Simon murmured after a while.
Raphael could not reply in kind. He did not like it, he … He felt conflicted, and could only understand one brazen, primal thing: he wanted more.
Just as Raphael gathered the courage, for once in his life, to enter blind territory with someone who would probably be the wrong choice, Simon declined his offer to accompany him to Dumort.
“It’s not my home, anyways,” Simon said before righting himself, huffing out a breath and turning around with a silly little wave as he walked out of the alley.