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“What exactly are we looking for?” Simon asked, wincing at the way his voice echoed around the dingy sewer.
“Shut up,” Jace hissed, elbowing Simon.
He stumbled from the impact, narrowly avoiding falling face first in the dirt (and he didn’t want to know what else) lining the floor.
“Dick,” he murmured, but there was no real venom in it. If anything, Simon coveted the casual physical contact that Jace offered him.
They were probably just a bro thing, but they provided a certainty to Simon and Jace’s relationship that really helped, sometimes.
Since Jace and Clary had broken up, and Simon had somehow wound up on Jace’s side of the split rather than that of the girl who was going to be his parabati, it was nice to have reassurance that he really was Jace’s friend.
Privately, Simon thought that Jace appreciated it, too, but he knew the other guy would rather cut out an eye than confess to anything of the sort.
Jace cocked his head to the side, gesturing to the blind spot the bend just ahead of them created.
That was another Jace thing: the hand gestures he expected everyone to get.
Annoyingly, Simon had spent enough time with him now to know exactly what his gesture meant.
“We’re expecting a demon nest?” Simon whispered this time, copying Jace’s movements by unholstering his weapon, too.
Jace made an irritated clicking sound with his teeth that Simon took to mean yes. “This is why you pay attention to the briefing.”
“You don’t pay attention to the briefing!” He whisper-shouted, and Jace rolled his eyes.
“Of course I do.”
“No, yesterday I saw you— Jace, look out!”
Jace turned at just the right moment, ducking below the head of the Shax demon that had come charging towards him.
He ignited his seraph blade with a low murmur of Gabriel and sliced the Shax demon in half with perfect precision from the bottom up.
Goo sprayed across the wall behind them in a spectacular arc, splattering across both of their fresh gear.
“Awesome.” Jace dragged a hand down his face to wipe as much of the ichor as he could away, exhaling deeply before rounding the corner where the rest of the nest were surely waiting.
Simon lit up his own seraph blade, not having the time to be wary. He wasn’t the most familiar with Shax demons, and arachnids were never pleasant.
Even if he’d faced hundreds of more horrifying monsters since, spiders still freaked him out.
He rounded the corner after Jace and came face-to-face with what must have been about a dozen Shax demons, their half-weaved webs dripping blood and saliva.
Ew.
They immediately began to lunge at Simon, pincers clipping like a monotone percussion band.
He tried to bat them away rather ungracefully with his sword as he fiddled around in his pocket, producing a second knife and lodging it into the throat area of the nearest demon with a flick of the wrist.
The fallout of that gave Simon the breathing room to rip the blade back out and spin around, stabbing two in the soft flesh located just beneath their exoskeleton at the same time.
Next to him, he heard the sickening squelch of Jace smooshing one of their faces into the floor with the bottom of his boot. He watched as several of its eyes burst with the impact of Jace using the half-squished head as a jump off point to kick the one behind him with a flamboyant roundhouse.
While it was reeling from the kick, Simon skidded forwards and ran it through, only exhaling once it had dissipated.
Jace stabbed his seraph blade into the ground through the squealing, half-dead beast he’d used as his personal trampoline, and it dispersed, too.
“See? Easy as pie.” Jace gave him a cocky grin, dripping with demon ichor and angelic energy.
How was it that he looked so ethereal when his hair was that mussed and his skin covered with so much goo?
It wasn’t fair.
Simon was too busy staring at Jace and Jace was too busy being stared at that when Jace spun around, he was just a moment too late, and he got knocked in the chin by the overly large pincers of the mother Shax.
“Jace!” Simon yelled out, watching as his combat partner went down and the arachnid crawled over his body, hard shell pressing against Jace’s chest and pinning him down.
A straggler crept out of the nest and made collided with Simon, clicking menacingly.
“Ew, ew.” He kicked it in the chink in its insect-like carapace for armour, and as it reared up on its back legs, Simon made to throttle it, one eye on Jace as he did so.
Jace had somehow lodged his fingers in the Shax’s skeletal armour, turning his face away from the pincers about to press into the soft flesh of his cheek. He pushed the base of his shoe against its underbelly, using the momentum to rip his fingers from its chest.
Simon would have heard the audible crunch across the space even if he hadn’t been paying attention to him.
Jace was unfazed, though, not even flinching, using his newly freed, newly broken hand to pick up his fallen blade and stab, again and again and again.
Even when he was just stabbing air.
The Shax Simon was holding at arm’s length wailed in his face, flecks of saliva hitting him in the eye.
Seriously, how had its windpipe not cut off by now? (Wait, fuck, did this thing even have a windpipe?)
Simon slammed it against the wall in a surge of adrenaline, hearing the clean crack but igniting his emergency dagger and slicing its throat just to be safe.
With one final scan around the vicinity to guarantee no more surprises, Simon wiped the back of his hand against his mouth, breathing in stunted, heavy pants.
Jace was still on his knees next to him, and Simon sank down to join him.
“We should get out of here,” Jace said, after a moment, wiping his hands on trousers.
They were both absolutely covered in goo and grime from the sewer, and he was right. The mission was finished, and they needed to get out of there.
“Is your hand okay?” Simon blurted out as he watched Jace push himself up off the floor, cursing his indelicacy instantly.
“What?” Jace glanced down at his fingers, bent back in all the wrong angles. “Oh, fuck. I didn’t catch that; thanks.”
His iratze rune glowed beneath his shirt, and after shaking it out a few times, Jace seemed content to forget about the injury.
But Simon couldn’t.
“How did you not notice?” He asked, pulling himself up off the ground to look Jace in the eye.
Jace shrugged, folding his arms against his chest. “Force of habit, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“God, Simon, you really don’t let things go, do you?” Jace sighed, meeting Simon’s gaze with a sobering look. “Valentine was my father. He wanted me to learn how to play piano, only he didn’t just want me to learn, he wanted me to be perfect, so every time I got a note wrong, he’d break the offending finger, heal it, and we’d do it until I didn’t make any mistakes. After a while, the novelty of having your fingers snapped wears off.”
A self-deprecating smile pulled at Jace’s lips, but Simon couldn’t stop the abject horror from showing on his own face.
He’d seen Jace play the piano, and he’d made fun of him for playing so perfectly. “Jace, I’m so—”
“Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay? Besides, I think the more important question is, why did you notice? Shouldn’t you have been focusing on your own demon?” Jace lowered his voice, his tone slipping into a sultrier one. “Am I really that irresistible?”
Simon’s breath caught. “W-what? No, that’s not—”
Jace laughed brightly, throwing an arm around Simon’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Lovelace. You’re not so bad yourself.”
And Simon had to do a double take because, wait, what?
“Is this just a masterful deflection technique, or are you being serious for once in your life?”
Jace pouted. “Can’t it be both?”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t.”