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If her mother were here—
—but she’s not.
But if she were, Clary muses to herself, her steps bouncing on the sidewalk as she hurries down the block, she would currently be scolding her daughter, wringing her hands in a worried movement, for being out so late. New York is home, but it isn’t safe, Clary reminds herself as she takes a cursory look for her surroundings, and she shouldn’t have stayed so long at the art studio today. Now her hands are dabbled in paint like they were little sponges, and her hair’s still pulled back in a haphazard bun, her red curls hanging low and loose as they escape the stressed elastic band.
She looks messy, but she doubts she’ll take the time to shower before going to bed. It’s late, there’s a cup of instant ramen noodles calling her name and a Netflix account full of Bob Ross: Beauty Is Everywhere waiting to be watched. Clary is lying to herself when she promises to wake up early to shower, but it’s a thought that puts her at ease her, anyway. Quickening her pace, she turns sharply to cut through an alleyway for a shortcut to her apartment, low-heeled boots making small and padded noises against the ground.
Oh, her mother would be livid.
Here she is, skinny and waif-ish Clary Fray, walking home alone, at night, through an alleyway. It’s a cacophony of bad choices, brimming with so many dangerous possibilities, and Clary, in an effort to keep her mind off the darkened alleyway dimly illuminated by street lamps that glow like eerie witch lights, can see it now, a headline for the morning news—
—Breaking News: twenty-year-old girl found dead in an alleyway, wearing uncomfortable knock-off Doc Martens that she found at a thrift store. And yes, she meant for her hair to look like a toddler decided to come at her hair with a pair of safety scissors; this struggling art student wanted bangs and watched exactly two YouTube videos in preparation for her self-given haircut. The fact is, is that she’s dead, and her stepfather is currently rolling over in his grave or in his hotel bed in Cabo (reports say that no one actually knows where Luke Garroway is, but he’s probably dead because everyone else is, and Clarissa Fray’s life couldn’t have possibly gotten any worse) because he was a literal cop and gave her the “stranger danger” talk a hundred times before. Judging by the body, she learned nothing.
That thought is enough to make Clary debate whether or not she feels like having two cups of noodles for her troubles, but a noise, low and gurgled and chilling, stops her. She freezes without meaning to, pivots on her foot to look around, and her breath catches in her throat.
Clary sees it, a low-crawling creature with leathery, wet skin that begins to skitter toward her. It’s too dark to see anything else but the sheen of light that reflects off its form, but she hears its heavy thumps against the ground, fast in spite of its size. Clary opens her mouth to scream but the sound bubbles up and dies in the air, and she stumbles backward, her legs strangely labored.
When she finally gains control over her body, Clary darts away, and the creature follows her, its claws scraping against concrete as it cuts her off, blocking the entryway. It senses her, the young woman realizes, though its dark yellow eyes seem to look at everywhere but her. Before she can look more closely, it lunges at her, and Clary gasps at the immediate pain she feels in her abdomen.
Before she can run, Clary’s knees buckle out from under her. She falls back and crumbles against the wall, small and helpless, as the creature—it’s a demon—raises its claw to strike again. Squeezing her eyes shut, Clary braces for the attack, and in the span of a second prays that there really might be a heaven and that her mother is waiting for her. She might see Simon again, hopes that Luke is still alive and that he’s safe and happy and calm, wants to know if Magnus—Magnus?—is okay, and wishes that Izzy—
Izzy.
Clary hears a snap, a reverberating, cracking sound, and sees the creature jump back a sizeable distance from Clary. A whip follows its movement for a moment before returning to its owner, and—and damn.
This woman is beautiful, dark and slinky like a shadow, as she flicks her wrist to ready her weapon again. She doesn’t seem to notice Clary, or pretends not to, and narrows her gaze when the demon turns on her. It scrambles toward her, claws scraping against the ground, and Clary finds her voice, then, screaming, “Watch out!”
She turns to the sound of Clary’s voice, and even in the washed-out lighting Clary can see the woman’s eyes widen like she’s seen a ghost, like Clary is a ghost. Her lightly tanned skin has paled to a shade that is scarily gray, and her lips part as if she wants to say something, but she snaps her jaw shut, grunting when her distracted staring earns her a swipe from the demon. She doesn’t collapse like Clary did, though, and instead only looks annoyed.
“Play nice,” the girl commands. She brings her whip up again and snaps it, the coil wrapping around the demon. With a tug, it constricts and explodes into a golden dust, shimmery and weirdly beautiful, Clary dizzily thinks, and she uses her jacket to cover up her stomach as she waits for the woman to survey the scene.
The creature gone, the other woman, dressed in all-black and sporting a pair of high-heeled boots, finally stumbles forward, clutching onto her arm. It’s bleeding steadily, and she’s somehow also gotten a smack against her face that’s rapidly purpling as Clary watches her. Quickly, the dark-haired woman, with a curtain of shiny, wavy hair that falls in soft movements against her shoulders, pulls out a small and silver instrument that’s only a little bigger than a pen.
It’s at that moment that Clary really looks the other woman over—she has tattoo-like marks that cover her skin. The black swirls look familiar, she realizes, and as she tries to get a closer look, she nearly falls forward onto her face.
“…you can see me,” the woman says with a small, quiet voice. She traces the not-pen along her arm and lets out a small sigh, like she suddenly feels better.
Clary nods and swallows thickly. Her vision is swimming, but she starts to push herself up, using the wall as her leverage. “I—you? I think, you know, that thing is probably weirder than—” than a hot girl with a low-cut tank top and blood smeared on her cheek.
It’s also at that moment when Clary realizes why she watched and re-watched Tomb Raider so many times during her childhood. Now she knows that it wasn’t just for a compelling storyline.
Or at all for that.
It was for Angelina Jolie.
“…you might be right about that,” the other woman smiles, her lips cherry red. She looks around worriedly like she’s been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing, but she eventually relaxes once she realizes they’re alone. “Are you okay?”
Clary shakes her head like an idiot, which isn’t entirely a lie—just as she’s beginning to think the burning pain in her abdomen is going to make her pass out (or worse, throw up in front of this beautiful woman), she begins to feel numb, in the sense that she’s cold and uncomfortable. But her jacket covers the actual wound, and she supposes that it’s dark enough that Even-Better-Angelina-Jolie doesn’t notice.
She walks up to Clary, close and unaware of the lack of personal space between them. Gaze drifting over to the woman’s arm, the redhead notices that the wound is already closing up, though the trail of blood remains. She opens her mouth to ask but has to stifle a wet-sounding cough that leaves her chilled and shaking. With fumbling fingers, she moves her jacket to the side and reveals her white t-shirt wet and dyed with blood.
Hastily, the other woman’s brow furrows, and she glances back up with Clary, her brown eyes storming with concern. Even in a moment like this, Clary thinks that, without shoes, she’s probably shorter than Clary is.
Weird.
“…I’m not going to die, am I?” Clary asks in a stupidly childish voice. She sways on her feet, grateful when the other woman hooks an arm around her waist. Her touch is delicate, but her fingers brush against the wound. Unable to keep a sharp hiss from escaping her lips, Clary lets her companion carry most of the weight between them.
“Clary, I can’t—” the other woman begins, her face pale as she searches Clary’s expression for something.
Clary isn’t sure what she’s looking for, but there’s a thought that stays in the forefront of her mind.
Clary.
“You—you know my name—” the redhead mutters, unsure whether she should be distraught or amazed. She chooses to be happy instead, buoyant in a flutter of suddenly feeling light-headed and very hot again. A small smile works its way onto her features, and Clary leans against her.
When the dark-haired woman doesn’t say anything, Clary bites down on her lip and shrugs. “We could go to my apartment,” she offers, thinking the information is a little unhelpful.
Fortunately, she receives a short nod in response. There’s a voice in Clary’s head that tells her that she’s being irresponsible, that for some odd reason she’s cornering this other woman into breaking rules, but she can’t understand why. She doesn’t even know this girl, and yet—when she looks at her more closely, when she stares at the concerned profile of her literal savior (at least in this moment), she’s sure she knows her, intuitively.
“Tell me where to go,” she says, already beginning to walk. The two of them together are clumsy—one woman is injured, the other probably sleep-deprived, if the purplish circles under the dark-haired woman’s eyes are anything to go by.
Clary drowsily directs her toward the apartment complex; she’s strangely self-conscious about what her new friend will think of the place—it’s a little depressing, but not unusual for any other New York resident. In fact, it’s remarkable Clary can even live alone with her thin budget, though she’s stuck in a dingy studio apartment with a rust-circled bathtub and water that only runs lukewarm, both ways.
“So what’s your name?” Clary asks, looking over with starry eyes as they look both ways before crossing the street. At least Luke’s many lessons on traffic safety haven’t gone unappreciated.
“…what do you think it is?” On its own, the question could almost be thought of as rude, a question to answer another question. And yet, the shorter woman says it in such a careful way, her voice guarded and her eyes downcast.
She’s scared, Clary realizes; or she thinks this woman is, in her fevered opinion. But she also thinks the ground is spinning around them, like that one tilt-a-whirl that made Simon sick when they were twelve, so is her opinion really valid at this point?
With a small sigh, the redhead admits, “I don’t know why, when I saw you, I thought—” She throws her free arm out in a wide, frenzied movement that startles the other woman, “—Izzy.”
When the other woman stops suddenly, Clary jolts to a halt, as well. She wants to ask, what the heck? But she also wants to maintain a semblance of friendship with her very pretty action-hero friend, so she watches, a little concerned, as the dark-haired woman’s jaw sets firmly. When she looks up at Clary, her expression betrays her cold, controlled form. There’s nothing clinical about the way she looks at Clary, her eyes wide and pleading, like she’s waiting for another shoe to drop.
But Clary doesn’t know what the first shoe was.
“…you know my name,” she—Izzy—says.
Perhaps it’s because Clary’s wound and subsequent blood loss makes her feel like she’s floating in a muggy haze, or maybe it’s because Izzy suddenly looks even more familiar than before (and Clary at least has the self-control to stop herself from pulling this woman into a tight hug, bury her face in her hair, close her eyes and fall asleep and never think of anything else), but she suddenly feels like crying.
Like sobbing, like holding onto Izzy and asking her to fix everything, all the things Clary doesn’t even know are broken. Sometimes, when Clary goes to bed, she dreams of abstract colors and flashes of people and places and sounds that are so familiar yet so intangible, slipping through her fingers just as soon as she thinks she’s gotten them back. This, looking at Izzy and studying her blurring face, reminds her of that.
Izzy reminds her of red—deep and passionate, like silk or a rose petal. Her lips, red like rubies, a necklace that’s red, a red dress. Izzy, lying broken on the ground, held up by a dark-haired young man who calmly begs for her to be okay as a gash in her shoulder bleeds too heavily. Izzy, fiery and flaming, literally covered in fire, the palms of her hands charred as she begins to smolder away.
Clary’s hands are burning, too, begging to be pulled into a fireplace—
She doesn’t realize she’s hyperventilating before she feels Izzy’s arm tighten around her waist. “Clary,” Izzy says; she’s recovered since the initial shock and is now back to acting like a protector, “Clary, it’s okay, I’m here.” She stares at the redhead with a protective sort of ferocity that seems impossible for her slight frame. Izzy looks so small and delicate sometimes (sometimes? Clary doesn’t even know her—), but she’s resolute now and forces Clary through the heavy, sliding door that opens to the young woman’s apartment.
Through labored breathing, Clary’s sure she hears, “I’m not letting you go again,” and, “You should really lock the door.”
She doesn't know what those feelings were; one moment she was thinking about Izzy, and the next she was terrified for herself, her hands tingling as her brain screamed for her to run away. Clary's certain that that's what being hurt—truly hurt, at a core level—feels like, and she knows then that there are pains within her that she doesn't yet have access to. And to find the good memories that she's lost, the ones about Isabelle laughing and holding her hand and dragging her down a weirdly tech-heavy church's hallway, she has to confront the ones that will remind her of a piercing pain against her collarbone, a tie to something darker.
Not dark like Izzy. Izzy is dark like a rainy night, comforting and warm and familiar. The darkness Clary can see behind her vision, the kind that has come from her, is scary and freezing. Someday she'll have to embrace that cold, but not tonight.
When Clary is able to breathe again, she’s found that she’s lying on her floor, cushioned by the mattress underneath her. She hasn’t gotten around to decorating yet, or even buying a bedframe, and if her teeth weren’t chattering so badly, she would take the time to apologize to Izzy for the bareness that is her apartment. It looks sad and gray, peppered only with the colors from Clary’s paintings that line the wall and floor, and the young woman wonders if her current state reminds Izzy of her home.
If Clary could paint herself, she thinks her lips would be gray, her skin white, her hair orange, and her stomach red. Monochromatic at first, but there’s even a shade range in death.
When she laughs, she coughs, her stomach aching under the exhales. Clary’s gaze turns to Izzy, who has since knelt beside her, hands hovering over Clary’s form. She looks unsure but not scared, and she has pulled out that pen-like object from earlier. The redhead looks at it, transfixed by it, then weakly gestures to the marks that curl around Izzy’s skin.
“What are those?” she whispers.
“…they’re runes,” Izzy answers just as quietly. “You can see them.”
“You—keep saying that like you're surprised.”
Izzy looks as if she’s bargaining with herself over some matter Clary almost understands. Her name isn’t only Izzy, it’s also Isabelle, and she’s holding a stele, and she can use it to draw and activate runes, and—and when Clary thinks about runes, her heart contracts painfully and she feels punished for a crime she can’t remember committing. It’s as if Izzy, and everything that comes with Izzy, is right there for Clary but is hidden behind an invisible wall.
And where there’s a wall, there could be a window.
Clary just has to be creative. And good at making holes in walls.
“Mark me,” she asks, or rather, requests (or demands), and offers her arm for Izzy to take.
It’s the certainty in her voice that seems to frighten Isabelle, her hand stilling as she clutches so tightly onto her stele that her knuckles turn white. If she draws a rune on Clary, she saves her life, but she’s responsible, then, for everything that happens afterward. If the Angels are displeased, they can’t only blame Clary for disobedience—Isabelle will be linked to Clary, culpable for reintroducing her to a world that has only ever tortured Clary’s human half and canonized the angelic half.
Clary was too human, too sensitive and fragile; but she was too angelic, too—too powerful, too uncontrollable. She was a force that had to be squashed, leaving only a half-happy shell of a girl who intrinsically knew that she didn’t belong.
But if she doesn't do it, then Clary dies here.
It’s a little scary, the redhead thinks, that she knows so much about a life she can’t quite remember.
“Things can’t go back to the way they were,” Isabelle says, as if she’s been able to read Clary’s fast-moving mind, her gaze dark and haunted, as she guides her stele across Clary’s now-exposed forearm. "They can't."
Clary’s breath hitches at the familiar, hot sting of the instrument, brow furrowing as Izzy traces a dark mark against her still-shockingly pale skin. The stele leaves dark lines on her arm, and Clary thinks it feels like an invitation to return home. She uses her other hand to touch the rune, her lips curving upward in a small, understanding smile. Immediately, she feels some relief from the pain—when she coughs, it doesn’t hurt, but Clary still feels faint. Yet, when she truly considers it, she feels stronger now than she has in years. It doesn’t make sense, really, but she’s grounded by Isabelle’s presence.
There are no words to make everything alright again. Izzy’s chest is rising and falling erratically, a give-away to betray her still form. Her own iratze she’s activated has helped close the wound on her arm, but her cheek is still swollen and red and purple with an angry-looking bruise. Distantly, Clary wonders if she should get up and offer a bag of frozen peas to help with the pain, but a part of her—the part that knows Isabelle in that inherent, needing sort of way—reminds her that Izzy would probably just laugh her off.
Instead, Clary reaches over and takes Isabelle’s hand, the one that’s holding the stele. Her memory is clicking into place, slowly and painfully, and it’s possible that she may never remember the same Isabelle that slipped through her fingers the first time. The sultry, confident Isabelle who was nearly broken beyond repair, whose wrists still bear scars that no healing rune will abate; the same one whose gaze hardened like steel thrown into a fire, but whose hands never lost their gentle touch.
And in return, she may never again be Isabelle’s Clary, whoever that is. She may pretend to be, she may remember that she was, but she may never be—and it is Isabelle’s risk to take, if she chooses. It was Isabelle’s choice to mark her, and she’s already taken that step, for all the hurt and pain that may follow.
Clary squeezes Isabelle’s hand, watching as the other woman flicks her gaze back up to meet the redhead’s wavering gaze.
She’s tired now, the venom working its way through and out of her system, and though her skin feels like it could melt off with the slightest touch, Clary finds herself leaning toward Isabelle, searching and near-pleading. She closes her eyes when Izzy presses a hand against the redhead’s cheek, her touch tentative and scared; Izzy lowers her head and glances up at Clary through long, dark lashes.
Clary says in a stumbling, slurred voice, “Then we can just put them back differently this time.” The runes will go in different places on her body, and she’ll regain her memories, not as they were chronologically, but as they reinvent themselves for her. Clary will come back how she does, and if Izzy chooses, she’ll be there to guide her.
Clary thinks she sounds stupid, and as Izzy’s lips upturn in an amused smile, she knows she does.
But perhaps Izzy doesn’t seem to mind. She just laughs, the breath short and tired, and scoots forward, helping Clary to lie back down against the mattress. The redhead falls with an ungraceful plop, quite differently from Isabelle, who lowers herself beside Clary, still watching the other woman.
It’s a few agonizing moments before Isabelle speaks again, soon enough because Clary’s nearly fallen asleep (or passed out). “…do you think you belong here, Clary?” she asks slowly.
Whether the dark-haired woman is referring to the apartment, or to this life, Clary can’t be certain. Blinking back at Izzy, mouth open in an unattractive stare as she tries too hard to stay alert, she shakes her head. The movement makes her dizzy even as she’s lying down, and she closes her eyes for just a moment. When she opens them, though, Izzy’s moved, has gotten up and is now pacing along the length of the apartment—it’s too small for Isabelle, Clary lazily thinks. Izzy belongs in lavish luxury, with a comfortable bed that has posts, and a canopy, and a giant makeup mirror, and Clary—
—maybe Clary’s there sometimes. Maybe they belong in the same room. Maybe Izzy’s Clary belonged with Izzy.
“You can come back with me,” Isabelle says quietly, her voice like a rolling lullaby, quiet and melodic, as she turns to look back at Clary. She’s so beautiful, the other woman thinks, that it’s impossible to imagine ever giving her up. In that moment, she questions the Angels, imagines those omniscient beings to be weak and temporal and wishy-washy and jerks, and Clary challenges them to defy her again.
She doesn’t realize that she’s been talking out loud until Isabelle crosses over to her again, her smile soft and reverent. It’s strange, that someone as illustrious as Isabelle Lightwood (Lightfood? Lighthouse? no, Lightwood) looks at someone like Clary like she’s capable of stringing up the moon and twisting the stars into place like simple, twinkling lightbulbs.
But Izzy does.
“Only Clary Fairchild would threaten to punch an Angel,” Izzy mutters softly. She brushes some hair away from Clary’s face, huffs when Clary’s eyes follow her movement. She leans forward, her lips close enough that Clary can practically smell her lip gloss (it’s either strawberry daiquiri or Clary’s had a stroke), and in a particularly forward move, the redhead closes the distance between them.
The distance being, naturally, Clary’s nose to Isabelle’s cherry red lips.
With a surprised noise, Izzy pulls back and touches a finger to her lips. She looks like she’s about to ask if that was intentional, but then thinks that it’s Clary. Anything is a possibility.
“You look like a clown now,” Izzy says. She runs her thumb across Clary’s nose to remove the lipstick stain but doesn’t move her hand away.
“You kissed my nose—” Clary manages, feverish and tired, a dopey smile covering her face. She grabs onto Izzy’s hand and holds onto it loosely.
“You bumped into my lips.”
“I could—bump my lips against your lips,” the redhead finishes lamely. Her eyelashes flutter as she struggles to stay awake, tries to strengthen her grip in a silent plea for Izzy to hold onto her; she’s not sure she’ll make it this time around, being away from a life she can’t even remember, and knows that she needs it and needs Isabelle.
Maybe she’s broken Isabelle’s heart before. Clary can’t recall if she has. But she’s determined not to do it again.
“Get some sleep,” Isabelle mutters. She brings her arms around her body like she’s cold, but Clary suspects she’s only scared, that this—Clary waking up and seeing her and knowing her—is only the most wondrous of dreams. When she wakes, maybe Clary will have gone cold from this wound, or maybe she’ll have simply disappeared, but what they have now, delicate and mismatched as it is, reminds Clary of a life that she gets to fight for again.
It’s her life to reclaim, her life to remember, and if her mother were here—
—she’d tell her to fight harder for it this time.
As Clary blinks and begins to fall victim to her tiredness, a light, feathery soft something falls against her lips. Izzy leans over her (her Izzy, she dazedly reminds herself), and brushes her lips against Clary’s. Selfishly, Clary wishes that this is the kiss that wakes the sleeping princess, that Isabelle came and slayed the dragon, that everything falls back into place after this, but—but no. She kisses Clary, gently and with so much unsaid affection, and the only thing Clary knows is that she has a home somewhere else and that Isabelle is bringing her back.
She falls asleep and dreams of being held.