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“When are you going to tell him?” Alec asks, leaning against the doorframe of the small private area in the infirmary.
Jace looks up at him with a kind of fear in his eyes that Alec has seen a hundred times before - the quiet kind, the kind none of them will ever talk about because they all feel it, the internal kind that they pretend isn’t there every time they look at each other, or their mission, or their weapons.
Jace looks down and away, like he can pretend that Alec didn’t say anything at all, that this conversation is not finally being had.
“It’s too quiet,” Jace says instead, looking back over at Simon. He looks paler than ever, washed out and more sickly than even some of the corpses that are in the morgue. But he isn’t a pile of dust, so that counts for… something.
“I complain all the time about how he never shuts up, and now -” Jace curls impossibly more into himself.
When Jace had dragged Simon back to the Institute hours ago, both of them were absolutely covered in blood - mostly Simon’s. Alec still doesn’t really know what happened; between getting Simon to the infirmary and making Jace change out of his blood soaked clothes, Alec decided that he’d have to pick his battles.
“Now it’s just too quiet.” Jace turns his head even further away from Alec, sniffling in one awful loud sound. He looks exhausted and raw. He had been hysterical earlier, but somehow looking at him like this is worse; it’s like the fight in him is gone, like everything inside him has deflated, like Jace is staring at his own heart lying on the bed in front of him.
Alec supposes he might just be.
(Alec tries not to think about sitting at Magnus’ bedside, in the midst of everything going to absolute shit, how it felt watching Magnus sleep on after his body started rejecting Lorenzo’s magic. The world was quite literally on the brink of ending, but somehow Alec knew it would end early if Magnus ceased to be. His chest had hurt so much with this glass-cut feeling, like he was being slowly sliced open from the inside.
He tries not to dwell on the memory, but sometimes he pulls Magnus closer to him in the night when he can’t sleep because he’s reliving the all-encompassing terror in his chest of holding Magnus while he seized. He’s comforted by the steady sated thrum of his heart under his skin, but he knows Jace will never have that with Simon.)
“Magnus says he’ll be back on his feet in a few hours,” Alec tells him. Magnus has a soft spot for Simon - it make have taken Alec along time to understand why, but he thinks now he does. Something about his babbling and sunny disposition started to grow on Alec, somewhere along the line.
They’ve worked together a lot as they pilot new programmes to make Downworlders more involved in the running of the Shadow World at large. Simon is always ready to try - whether it be training or liasioning or something else, he takes a good stab at it. Alec can respect that, respect his ethic and commitment, and along the way he came to respect the man too. Still finds him wholly irritating at times, but it’s easier.
Jace doesn’t answer him, doesn’t acknowledge him. Alec tries to reach out to him, send something even vaguely comforting along the bond, but the only thing he’s met with is muddled confusion, pain, and the kind of numbness that doesn’t make you stop feeling things but only makes the inside of your head feel fuzzy and ice-cold. He pushes, harder, and something stirs in Jace, the equivalent of hands intertwining and holding like one of them might just drift away and be lost at sea.
He should have guessed a long time ago that this was coming - how easily Jace had given himself over to save Simon, made the cut himself and encouraged Simon to drink even though they’ve grown up knowing the consequences of vampire venom. All the tiny little things that Alec has seen and heard, and undoubtedly the ones he hasn’t seen or been told about.
“What do I do if I lose him?” Jace asks, still mostly turned away from Alec. “How do I - ?” He swallows. “What do I do?”
(Alec doesn't want to think about the way pure unadulterated panic had bled across to him, overwhelmed him while standing in Magnus’ apartment earlier that evening. He’d dropped a glass - one that had a spindly little stem and the shallow but wide top. It had shattered on the nice rug Magnus had picked out that morning.
Alec doesn't want to think about the weight of Jace just holding onto him after he lead him away from the infirmary to clean up, heavy but as far from solid or sturdy that Alec had ever felt. It was like he was shattering apart in Alec’s arms, just like the cocktail glass, trembling so deeply that it seemed to be radiating out of Jace’s very bones.
Alec doesn’t want to think about how maybe emotions are a hindrance in this line of work, doesn’t want to doubt what he risked everything for. Feeling Jace's pain everywhere, all over is almost too much, but he thinks of how it feels in his chest when he catches Magnus’ eye across a room, and he knows he must take the bad to deserve the good.)
“I don’t know,” Alec tells him. He can’t condense the fear he has that one of them will have to live without the other, that Magnus (and Simon) will be at their death beds and have to go on without them forever, down into words that exist. Alec isn’t good with words; he’s better now than he ever has been but he still isn’t good. Jace and Magnus and everyone he’s close to has just had to learn Alec, learn him and know him and understand him because Alec had never been able to articulate anything other than strategy and battle plans up until about a year and a half ago. He swallows. He doesn’t know.
“But you need to tell him.”
Jace scoffs, a wet tired sound half strangled in his throat. “Yeah, that always works out so well for me.” He sniffles into the sleeve of the first clean smelling sweater Alec had managed to pull out of his closet. It’s grey and soft and has something embossed across the front that has long since faded into being illegible. Alec is pretty sure it isn’t even Jace’s.
“He - jumped in front of me. Tonight,” Jace tells him. Alec is glad that he doesn’t have to pry it out of him, but is aware that Jace is just trying to change the subject. “A vampire, young, starved - she went for my throat, but Simon got in front of me first. He knocked the wind out of me and when I was able to get back up she was slashing at him. Got his neck. Then he just wasn’t healing, and I couldn’t - I couldn’t do anything.” Jace looks back at him sharply. “He’s so stupid.”
Alec lets out a surprised huff of laughter. “Tell him that.”
“I tell him everyday.” Jace slumps impossibly further into his chair, half a mirthless chuckle on his lips. “But I don’t think I can…. I can’t tell him.”
“He loves you.”
“Yeah, Alec, I know,” Jace rolls his eyes. “I know. It’s Simon. He couldn’t hide it if he even tried.”
Alec doesn’t ask why he doesn’t just tell Simon if he knows. It’s never that simple. They’ve been put through so much, walked through so much hell that they did it quite literally. Jace has a mantra carved into the walls of his skull in Valentine’s handwriting that he’s been fighting for years. Nothing is ever easy for them - not like this, in this way.
They lapse into silence then, just three bodies breathing in a room. It’s late. Alec longs to be with Magnus, knows he’s somewhere in the Institute, but he also knows that if he was with Magnus, he’d be worried about Jace. Magnus gets it, puts up with far more than Alec deserves. Alec doesn’t think he would have survived if he hadn’t breezed into the wedding like an on-coming storm.
“Wouldn’t it be worth it?” Alec asks quietly, spinning his wedding band around his finger. He doesn’t look at Jace, just tracks the steady rise and fall of Simon’s chest. “If you hadn’t gotten here fast enough, would you be able to live with never telling him?”
Jace stays quiet. The bond blooms with pain and fear and anger but also love and hope.
Simon, of course, chooses that moment to start waking up. They watch him as he blinks heavily and unseeingly for minute, eyes ghosting over Alec before finally settling on Jace, clearing and looking blearily at him. “Ugh, you look like shit,” he tells Jace, immediately followed by: “Are you wearing my sweater?”
Alec stands up to alert one of the medical staff, quietly paying attention to Jace launching into a rant about how stupid Simon is, an absolute fucking moron, I’ve been trained to fight for my whole life, you idiot!
Alec can’t help but smile a little to himself, and sends a little bit of something he hopes is encouragement along the bond, before finally leaving to find Magnus.