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grade-a-masochist · 2 years

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Kit and Ash headcanons pt. 2

Even more Kit and Ash (and co, at this point) headcanons! Ft. trauma, grief, terrible visions coming true and found family. And TMI gang feels. And some Blackthorn feels—well, TDA gang feels. Kierarktina, Haline, Blackstairs. Hell, we even have some Kitty. There’s just a lot of feels.

Remember how in the last post, I unintentionally got emotional over Tessa and Jem and Alastair and so many more bitches? Yeah, it happened again. Now we have everything here. This is basically a fit outline at this point. I'm sorry. Please give it a chance still.

Huge shoutout to @bookeater34 for reading so many of these to ensure they made sense.

Here is the first batch of Kit and Ash headcanons.

This was alluded to in the prior post, but: Ash's body temperature and pulse aren't exactly...normal.

Now, it is my personal headcanon that different types of Downwolders have different quirks to their physiologies. Same with nephilim.

Example: Warlocks tend to have slow pulses. The beats drag, heavy and languid, full of ease and without a care, like the drizzle of old, thick honey. Their tempo is largo, as though the heart knows it has all the time in the world to soften into its next beat. It's almost indolent, really, the way it doesn't ebb and flow so much as it drawls.

Their body temperature isn't quite warm, but it isn't quite cold, either. Just like warlocks themselves, it's caught somewhere in the middle, not indecisive, but rather content in its middle-ground. It's tepid, almost gently so. It isn't discomforting, isn't strange to the senses in the way the abrasive cold of vampire's is. Rather, it's welcoming and perhaps even soothing, in its own way.

(Tessa, being the sole example of her kind, only mostly falls under these categories.)

(Her temperature is higher than that of a common warlock. Enough that you could almost call it warm, if you were so inclined, if you really stretched the definition to its very limits to serve your purposes. Her pulse is a few beats faster than what is the norm for warlocks, enough that it's noticeable. The tempo isn't largo, but rather lento. Not only is it faster—it's also stronger. Harsher.)

(It's the nephilim blood in her. Which leads me to the next point.)

Nephilim run hotter than mundanes. Enough that it's conspicuous upon contact. It's like they've been out for a run and haven't quite cooled down; all soft, blazing, engulfing heat, though not uncomfortably so. Toasty warm, instead, like coming home. When they're in battle, it's like coming too close to a fire.

Similarly, their heartbeats are on the faster side. Their pulses are fierce, harsh things, like their hearts would like to run out of their chests sooner rather than later. Swift and steady, firm, utterly unyielding. Beating drums, war drums, pounding to an allegretto pace.

(Clary's case is a tad like Tessa's. Her pulse is faster, her body warmer, but not too much. Just barely enough for it to be noticeable. Like being under one too many blankets, moments away from being smothered by the packed heat of the weight, on the knife's edge between comforting and overwhelming.)

(Jace, on the other hand, feels downright feverish. It's sharp heat pressing down on you, like the veil of sunburn warming your flesh, sinking straight to your bones the minute his skin brushes yours. Clary likes it, because not many people are warmer than her, and she finds it cozy. His pulse is a rather passionate allegro, roaring stubbornly and ferociously, just like him.)

And then you have those that are both and neither.

(People like James, Lucie and Mina—they’re different. Their temperatures are gentle and lovely, like sun-warmed cheeks and blushing palms, warm like sitting beside a fire after a night out in the Londonian winter, because Shadowhunter blood will always prevail, even in them, but not enough to forget the cool reach of eternity. Their heartbeats are soft, looping things, slower than any Shadowhunter heartbeat; a cheery adagio, fierce against their ribcages but easy nonetheless, like gliding swans.)

(These differences, of course, are felt on some level by parabatais. Alec, Matthew, Cordelia, Simon—they can all tell that which is different in their parabatai, even if they occasionally lack a name for it.)

There’s werewolves and their click-fire metabolisms, always a step ahead of everything, with hearts like machine guns and bodies that are absolutely ruthless in their heat. They take running hot to a whole new level, their skin as hot as the sun’s beams on any given day, so that warlocks and vampires shy away from their touch with the same wariness that werewolves avoid theirs. There’s an incompatibility there, the hot-and-cold metaphor taken to an ironic degree by the angels and the demons, damn them both.

(Nonetheless, it doesn’t quite stop them.)

There’s vampires, too, and the utter silence in their chest, the sepulchral stillness. The graveyard that they crawled out of is in them, too, and it only has whispers of life, because it no longer beats. Their nails are sharp and sturdy, harsh like claws if they come down with intent, and their bones feel harsh to the touch, like coming into contact with steel, with concrete. They are cold as ice, smooth like marble and just as foreign to the touch, a discomfort that says something is wrong found in the skin that will not warm.

(Not entirely true. If they spend enough time around a werewolf, if they are touched enough, their skin retains a hint for a while. For enough time that they feel ever so slightly human.)

(There are comforts in rivalries, too.)

There are the demons, who are most similar to vampires in their disposition and most similar to werewolves in nature. Their metabolisms are quick like that of werewolves, with heartbeats that either run fast as the sun or stay still for entire minutes at a time, a wonder that no scientist in the Shadow World has figured out as of yet. The majority of them run hot, fiery hot, unbearably and unspeakably hot; none burns hotter than Lucifer himself, or so the legends say.

The Princes and Lilith, though, are sharp and unnatural in their grace, in their chill. There’s no flush to their skin and no warmth to it, either, even when they are injured. They are void, dark things, swirling with powers unknown, as though their entire frames were composed of ichor and illusions alone. They are ice cold and damning in it, with their talons and their claws and their sharp, sharp teeth.

(Sebastian was somewhere in the middle, burning alive for as long as he drew breath, with a heartbeat that ricocheted between the speed of a freight train going off the rails and a turtle’s pace. He always felt hot, like he was burning up, and yet his skin still was always cold, like he carried a fever with him everywhere he went, same as he carried shadows.)

(Maybe if he’d been born any other way, he would have come out more like Tessa. But no matter.)

And then there’s the fae. Oh, the fae. With their bone structure like the most exquisite, delicate porcelain and their intense, glimmering gazes. Their eyes were perhaps meant to startle, to absorb all the attention that they possibly could; fae themselves seemed designed to take over the mind of all who beheld them, all graceful lines and sharp angles and unforgettable voices. With their sharp canines, glinting like blades and just as wicked.

Their heartbeats were neither fast nor slow, somewhere between andante and moderato, like a joyful song, beautiful and enchanting in their rhythm. Their bodies, too, were neither here nor there in their temperature, leaning more toward each edge depending on the fae, depending on who and what and where. More often than not, though, they were cool to the touch, tantalizingly so, like the crisp night’s air in Faeri.

(The Queen and the King were opposites, in this. King Arawn burnt hot and bright, blazing paths left by his body when it met another, as hot as any Shadowhunter. The Queen was glacial, though, biting and numbing to the touch, and yet still so enticing, because she would welcome and soothe those that came into her arms.)

(Kieran is on the latter spectrum; polar cold, though not uncomfortably so. Rather, refreshingly so.)

(Ironies.)

Half faes depend wholly, as such.

(Mark and Helen are warm like mundanes are, a novelty for all nephilim, and their heartbeats were pleasant albeit swift things, the song of the fae becoming staccato in its haste.)

(Ash is an absolute travesty. He’s got the sharp canines of the fae, which are sharper still due to his demon heritage. He’s cold to the touch, too, sometimes shockingly so, and much like Lilith, there’s no warmth to his cheek and no color to his skin. His pulse is pleasant like all fae hearts are, but it’s far faster than that of Mark and Helen, far faster than that of common nephilim. It’s closest to the marching band of Jace’s heart, though still faster, sitting on the furthest edge of the allegro ladder. It’s always steady, though, and rarely does it stutter.)

(Kit is just as fascinating. His canines are sharper than they ought to be, noticeably and undeniably so, and they make his smile into something even more crooked. Kit is always warm to the touch, a steady, cozy pulse, entirely unyielding, much gentler than the nephilim heat and softer still than the cold he’s grown to associate with fae. His heartbeat is slow and syrupy, like Mina’s, and yet much more graceful, doing the same lovely song and dance of the fae. It’s utterly hypnotizing, much like Kit himself becomes as he settles into the secrets of his blood, without even realizing it is so.)

(All of him is inviting, not because of how alien he is, but because he feels unfathomably familiar, incomprehensibly welcoming.)

(Just as all of Ash is enticing, precisely because every sense is bewildered by him and every instinct fails to recognize him.)

(Like this, they are a complete juxtaposition.)

(But the who to the what makes them make sense.)

Ash gets control of his loyalty spell.

Now, I know you're shaking your heads, but hear me out.

Ash's loyalty spell is completely separate from his will. He has no control over it and, as such, is as much its victim as everyone affected by it. He's perpetually isolated by it, because he will never have genuine affection that has not been manufactured by the magic applied to him. That's a sad fucking reality to live in.

(And Ash is, as we know, bitterly and acutely aware of this. He's no fool; he has a perfect understanding of the fact that everyone who has ever cared for him, who has ever dedicated themselves to him, has done so because their will has been literally bent into that shape without either of their consent.)

(And there's no better way to convince someone of their utter incapability of being loved than giving them irrefutable proof of it. Ash has only been shown love as a result of the magic inlaid in his bones, which is no more in his control than it is in the control of those it preys on.)

(Hence, with the notable and frankly appalling exception of Janus, Ash has never been loved for who he is. Never genuinely.)

It's a reality Ash very obviously doesn't want to live with. He's not shy about how much he abhors the position the spell puts him in, and how much it's isolated and destroyed him.

Which is to say, if he could get rid of it, I believe he'd jump at the fucking chance.

But the thing is—can he get rid of it?

Call me crazy, but I find it very hard to believe. Perhaps it's because I am a fan of characters having to adjust to undesirable parts of their lives instead of said parts being removed, because mental illness and trauma, but I actually do have plot reasons, too.

Ash has had these spells inlaid upon him for the majority of his life. At this point, he is as much the magic he has been forced to carry as he is the blood running through his veins and the calcium making up his bones. These spells that make him so lethal, that make him so untouchable, that have made him so lonely, are a part of who he has been made to be.

You can't rip out an organ because it is ill and that is undesirable. Instead, you treat it. You adjust.

Ash cannot destroy the spell. That much I believe to be true. I think that it's too integral to what he is, if not who he is, to be torn from him.

But why should he be unable to learn to control it?

It's stated that Ash had been inlaid with the same spells that Auraline was, once upon a time, and that they both commanded perfect loyalty and affection. But the King felt confident enough to send an assassin after her nonetheless, as though the spell wasn't a constant in regards to her.

In her case, it wasn't a constant outpour that demanded everyone drop to their knees for her. Instead, it is stated that she commanded the assassin's loyalty in order to survive. Hence...it's fair to work under the assumption that she actually had control over this aspect of her gifts, unlike Ash.

It could be argued this was because of the blood of the two courts running through her, the one that gave her the unimaginable problems Kit will now be wielding. (Scary stuff.)

A case could be made that it was her blood that granted her control, and nothing else. Hence, because Ash and her are different breeds, he can only ever hope to survive the magic, not to actually hone it.

But.

But a better argument can be made that the reason Ash has no control over it is because the King learned from his mistakes, and clipped his wings early. No control, no autonomy, no running away. No precious weapons being stolen. No losses.

The King made Ash in the image of the heir he had wanted, but he carved him into the shape of a weapon very, very purposefully. A weapon only he could wield, one he could control entirely.

(Ash really has jumped from one abuser to another, huh.)

But Ash does have autonomy and he did run away and now the King has absolutely no control over him. Pity. (Not.)

Even with all this, though, the loyalty spell is very much what it was before. Nothing about it has changed. Hell, for all Ash knows, nothing about it can change.

Enter Christopher Herondale, stage left.

Among the pond of differences and ocean of similarities between the two of them, one reigns supreme—they are, fundamentally, as people, creatures that they cannot understand. There's nobody else like them. They lack the means and the information to make sense of themselves, their abilities and limitations, and the implications of all of it.

And there's very little anybody in their lives can or is willing to do to help them parse it out. Even when they want to.

But Kit and Ash themselves can figure out a way to parse their abilities, somehow.

In Kit's case, it's a matter of discovery, acceptance, practice and control. Rinse and repeat for every different facet of what he can do, which grows every day without him being able to stop it.

But the matter of the fact is that, however microscopic it might be—Kit actually does have control. Somewhat. Kind of.

Ash is floored.

It doesn't take Kit too long to realize how much Ash hates his loyalty spell, largely because he can't control it at all. Every morsel of love or affection he receives is second-guessed and facsimile. It's a horrible existence.

It also doesn't take either of them too long to realize that the answers to Ash's qualms lay in the book Kit hates most in the world—the Black Volume of the Dead.

In its pages lies the means to Ash's freedom, whatever it may be, and they're both sure of it.

But finding the book is, for obvious reasons, a little out of the question.

(Or is it.)

(Is it...)

After King Arawn is dead, the spell remains in place and unchanged. It's the same ball and chain Ash has gotten used to hauling around. It's the exact same burden that he just can't seem to get rid of.

Kit and him try a long list of things during the years.

(It takes them about a year to build enough trust and rapport to actually discuss the matter and try to approach it in a somewhat constructive manner, but that still leaves him with one or two years to tackle it, give or take.)

Kit goes through all the ancient tomes in Cirenworth's library that might hold something worthy of note. The ones at the London Institute, too, in due time. He tries asking Jem and Tessa about it, and gets little out of them because, for all their years, some things are still beyond them. He tries asking Magnus, too, which is a...very interesting conversation, but a mostly fruitless one, since it just confirms what Kit already knows.

(Extraordinary magic, deeply unusual, hard to cast and hard to find, theoretically eternal, only found in the most unique and powerful of tomes, not something to be trifled with.)

(Here's the real kicker: it's permanent.)

By God, he even tries remembering all the spell books he'd grown up around and hunt some down, with a success rate of exactly zero.

Ash, on the other hand, tries to get information out of the fae. Difficult to do, considering he's wholly isolated from them, but he gets some things. Mostly, that it's the magic that made Auraline so beloved, and that she wore it like a crown. When he asks his mother, she has less to say before she cleverly shuts him down. All she does give him is that he seems far more compelling than Auraline was.

(Kit and Ash grimace at each other that night. Being right was, for once, far from a pleasant thing.)

He tries listening for rumors. Talking to those that go unnoticed and thus unpunished, those that always know more than they let on. They're charmed by his existence and he lets it run wild, as wild as he possibly can, but even so, there's little they have to tell him

The fae hold no real written records and, even if they did, it'd be impossible for Ash to get them.

After months and months of research of all kinds—Kit even resorted to talking to ghosts, for Pete's sake—they have to address the kelpie in the room. They have to admit it to themselves.

There's no answer outside of the Black Volume.

Their hands are tied.

And then, as per usual—the dreams begin.

The Dreams. Capital D. These fall under the category of things that he knows that he shouldn't know. Future and past memories. Things he doesn't want to see that he's always forced to behold. The usual.

Except that these aren't visions about Idris or Lake Lyn or the Blackthorns. There's no Ash and no Faeriland and no screams. No fire. No nothing.

There's pages, instead. Pages of a book. Pages upon pages of old, yellowed pages, positively ancient and positively evil, too. He could feel it, the power they held thick against the walls of his mind like the whispers of London's catacombs. Sinister, enticing whispers, the kind that came with things he wanted nothing to do with.

Naturally, Kit recognizes said pages.

Small, frantic handwriting cramped between the margins of the weathered pages, like there was too much to say and too little time, too little space. Little sketches of screaming faces and corpses and skeletons. Dried, aged ink.

("It's the bloody Volume of the Dead," Kit mutters as he wakes up, flopping back into bed to scream into his pillow until he runs out of breath.)

(Damn whoever wrote the cursed book and damn his heritage for the dreams and damn them all, actually.)

(Kit is officially and entirely done. He's moving to Estonia. He can send Jem, Tessa and Mina postcards. Ash won't even mind—)

(Ah.)

(Ash.)

(Damn it all to hell and back.)

Despite Kit's most fervent hatred for every accursed thing that book has to say, the dreams persist. It features in every moment of sleep he has that isn't spent in Faeri with Ash, a wealth of terrible knowledge and horrible power falling into his hands with all the ease of autumn leaves. They pool there, no matter how hard he tries to shake them. The knowledge stays, no matter how vehemently he tries to forget it.

And eventually, after days turn to weeks and weeks start turning into months, it gets hard to ignore.

So. In the most ironic twist of fate ever. Kit stops ignoring it.

(He gets himself a small, nondescript notebook. Pocket-sized. The kind he learned through his father that nobody really asks about. He gets himself a pack of cheap ball-point pens, because nobody asks about those, either.)

(He puts his years with his father to good use. When Jem and Tessa are out with Mina and he's in with an essay, he empties his bookshelf, filled with all the books he's been gifted these last two years. It's an antique bookcase, with glass and lovely wooden drawers at the bottom; they're mostly decorative, given their age, but he and Jem have fixed them up enough for his school supplies.)

(Where nobody would think twice to look too hard.)

(He makes a false bottom out of them, careful to make it good and hard to find. He fills it up with enough embarrassing things that it wouldn't matter. He puts the notebook at the very back, hidden in plain sight, because a glamour would actually be more suspicious.)

(And then he starts writing the pages in his dreams down as well as he can from memory. With his runes, it isn't particularly hard. A little Mnemosyne here, a little Stamina there, one or two Energy runes to keep himself awake through an entire night to get as much as he can down, and bam.)

(A pocket-sized, annotated section of the Black Volume of the Dead, the most powerful and fearsome tome in the Shadow World.)

(Hidden in a teenager's bookshelf.)

(Because of his psychic, prophetic dreams. Which were in this case, theoretically, triggered into summoning sinister spells into his dreams, to help his winged companion who he sees in his dreams.)

(Jesus.)

While writing it all down, Kit realizes his suspicions were correct; the section he's been dreaming about is all about the extraordinary, unique, ancient loyalty spell that has plagued Ash for years. The one he wants gone more than anything.

The one that is, like almost everything in the goddamn book, fucking permanent. Apparently, such is the price for the most wicked magic in the world. Nothing like finality to drive the point across.

Once out of the fugue state that had possessed him as he wrote and wrote and wrote, Kit goes back through every nitty-gritty detail, through every single word, and promptly realizes that there really is no way to reverse the spell. It really is a burden to carry for a lifetime.

But—and here's an even better kicker—there is a way to change who controls the spell.

(Arawn is dead. The person who originally controlled the spell is gone. Thus, the change is possible. It is very, very possible.)

Kit sees the first glimmer of hope in fucking months, and goes the fuck to sleep.

(Ash is...somewhat unsurprised to hear Kit has been dreaming about the Volume of the Dead. He is somehow more taken aback by the fact that Kit actually preserved what he saw in the hopes of helping Ash. Kit doesn't get it.)

("Of course I did it," he says, cocking a brow. "I told you we'd figure it out somehow, didn't I?")

("I guess you did," Ash murmurs in return, and then listens to Kit ramble about what they could do.)

A plan—the worst Kit has ever seen or been a part of, the most horrendous piece of tactical brilliance maybe ever, even worse than Ty's plan to bring back Livvy, and isn't that just adding insult to injury—is formed.

A warlock is contacted.

A house-visit is planned.

("Hello, Miss Vex," Kit says breezily, a smile like caramel on his mouth and gold in his hoodie pocket, where he holds his hands. "Long time no see.")

(Hypatia pulls him into the apartment and into her study with the most unimpressed of sighs, looking at Kit like he's quite a droll thing. "Not long enough," she says pleasantly, sitting behind her desk and folding her hands in a way Kit recognizes.)

(Down to business it is.)

("Ah, but see, I needed someone with a broad mind and a very careful mouth, and then I thought, who knows how to keep a secret well, for the right price?" It's both bravado and honesty, and Kit stands behind the chair he's supposed to be occupying, perching his hands on its slope primly. Shadowhunter calm. Shadowhunter grace.)

(Hypatia narrows her eyes, some shadow crossing the molten gold of them, like a flare of her star-shaped pupils. It's an uncomfortable look to be under. It feels like being dissected. But Kit has been dissected his entire life and so he keeps his pulse steady and his breathing calm and his smile in place. He keeps himself still.)

(And then Hypatia dips her head just a bit. "For the right price," she concedes.)

(Kit reaches into his hoodie and retrieves a heavy pouch, placing it on the desk with the glorious sound of money, of artifacts, of things a boy with sticky fingers and knowing eyes can get oh so easily.)

("How would you like to keep a couple secrets for me, Hypatia?" Kit says, a dark note to his pleasant tone, leaning more weight on the chair. He is still. Lethally so. He does not blink.)

(Hypatia's starry eyes gleam. "I'm all ears, Herondale.")

(Kit smiles and sits.)

A deal is made.

The use of a spell is learned. The process of its ritual is, too.

And so, one day, Kit walks into the clearing at Faeri in his dreams, and when Ash smiles in greeting, Kit can smile back and say, "I've got it."

(It's not easy. In fact, it's absurdly difficult. It's hard enough to keep it a secret from everyone. Harder still for Hypatia and him to figure it out on their own under secrecy. Even more so without the person Kit's trying to help actually physically present in their realm.)

(Even once they've figured out the theoretical how, it still seems brutally difficult and brutally cruel to put anyone through, nevermind Ash.)

(It's Ash's choice, though. Not Kit's. And so he thanks Hypatia for weeks of business, leaves her with secrets interesting enough that the gold will keep her mouth shut, and gives Ash what he wants.)

The next day, Ash positively throws himself at him in an embrace. The clash of them is more vibrant than usual, the pressure harsher, more unstable. For a minute, it's like a blow, until it eases and Kit can actually breathe and hug Ash back with little hesitation.

"It worked," Ash says, voice full of wonder and breathless with delight. "It's actually mine now. It really is."

Kit squeezes him harder. "Who else's?"

("My control leaves much to be desired," Ash admits later, as he excitedly tells Kit of the fact that people are actually able to not give a damn about him now. "But now, I can actually do something about it.")

("And you will," Kit says, before mischief takes over his grin. "Come on, try me.")

In the end, it takes even more months before Ash can actually control it. Before he can pull it around him like a veil or tuck it into his bones to sleep. Before he can hone it into a weapon he has control over, and reclaim one tiny piece of himself.

Now, when someone stays, he won't have to wonder.

And maybe that makes it worth it.

(Although, a year later, Kit reconsiders this greatly optimistic perspective, as someone shouts—"YOU USED THE BLACK VOLUME OF THE DEAD?")

Ash is possessive of Kit.

Mightily so.

Not even in the "only I can have you, I'll lock you up in a tower with a dragon" way. He's not that fucked in the head.

(Well, he is—half a lifetime of abuse and unresolved and largely unacknowledged trauma will do that to you—but it doesn't present itself that way, okay.)

It's more in the way that he defines his relationship to Kit in terms that really only make sense to him.

Which are possessive terms.

I mean, come on. This is the same guy who answered Janus's "You are mine," with a genuinely delighted, "Who else's?"

Tell me he wouldn't be this way. That's right, you can't.

The thing is, it's not ownership. Not precisely. It's less about him actually owning Kit and more about him feeling a sense of belonging in regards to him. A mutual one, at that, as far as he's concerned.

The way Ash sees it, they do not own each other. They belong to each other. And that is wholly and entirely different, as he will very passionately declare.

(Ash is used to being owned. The Queen owned him from the moment he was born, and then the King stole him before his father did, and his mother owned him again after that, and now Janus owns him, too, though this is one time he's okay with it. He doesn't mind being owned. He's familiar enough with it that he finds it easy to accept. He finds the certainty of it somewhat soothing.)

(He does not find the idea of owning Kit pleasant, though. Moreover, though he would not mind being owned by him, it feels wrong to say. Inaccurate. Ownership is not what he wants them to be.)

(Ash thinks of the quiet sense of belonging that had bloomed within him when Kit stayed, scathing remarks and venomous glares and vicious distrust and all, not because of the spell but because of him. On some level, at least.)

(And he thinks that yes, belonging, that's what it is. That's what they are.)

(They do not need to own each other when they already belong to each other, right?)

To Ash, the easiest way to define their relationship—which does not fit the label of "friendship," as it has been described to him, but also does not fit the label of an ally or an enemy—is in terms of belonging. To each other.

Which. Um.

Yeah.

It goes something like this:

Julian, ever the mother hen, has some serious questions about the boy Dru is a tad too familiar with, particularly because Julian does remember him and not in a very positive way. They're thick as thieves, though Julian somehow has a hard time imagining Ash getting up to any common mischief. Though he did bite Emma that one time. Mayhaps there are layers to the matter.

(One such very interesting layer being that, despite the ice cold spell on his emotions being gone, Julian feels nothing out of the ordinary for Ash. Nothing he hadn't already felt, like curiosity or wariness or the beginnings of ruthless, callous disregard, if necessary. No need to protect. No need to preserve.)

(Emma doesn't, either. He can see it in her eyes, clear and fierce as they always are, but different from the warmth and kindness she reserves for those she considers family. Right now, there is no glimmer of the honey-sweet blaze of protective rage Julian knows so well. Only wariness and a hesitant sort of calm.)

(The same calm in Tessa's eyes, which perch upon Ash with a familiarity that seems a tad haunted, looking oddly morose. It is different from the calm in Jem's eyes, which seems more calculating, on the knife's edge of strategy. The same calm Julian might see in his own eyes.)

(And still, the wariness in all their shoulders, hands a tad too still. Shadowhunter still, even though Tessa cannot bear runes and Jem has chosen to leave them behind, in another life.)

(In all shoulders except Dru's, because hers curve with a hopeful sort of awe, with a cheerful kind of delight, as she asks Ash questions or shoots him looks when she thinks he won't notice. Julian isn't sure if she's yet realized that Ash notices everything going on in the room, even if he does not give any indication of that fact.)

(He isn’t sure she’s realized he’s shooting her looks, too. Curious and perplexed, and wistful and longing in a way Julian doesn’t quite understand, even though he recognizes it at once.)

(He’s seen it on enough faces.)

(Kit hardly seems at all bothered by Ash’s presence, either, because his shoulders are tense with a wariness that isn't aimed at Ash, but rather on his behalf. It's not in his eyes, not in his face and not in his hands, but it is in the slight bump to his shoulders, the curve that should be a straight line. It's well hidden, so much so it takes Julian a long, long while to realize it. Kit has always been a good liar, a good actor, and he's gotten frighteningly better. Julian feels queasy just thinking about what he could get away with.)

(Dru and Kit are not worried for themselves, but rather for the fae boy, and Julian is inclined to believe it's wholly out of their own free will, because he's running entirely on his own.)

(Everybody seems to be, in fact, even though Ash had been like a siren back in Thule, the only beautiful thing in a world of ash and blood.)

(Now, the pull is so thin as to not be there at all.)

(Very curious indeed...)

They ask their questions, all three of them. Emma asks the kind of probing, narrow-eyed questions that make most people jump to the defensive. The kind that the fae are perfectly comfortable circumventing. Ash doesn't disappoint; he doesn't break a damn sweat, adding fuel to the fire with an ease that's rather infuriating, expression perfectly calm all the while. Occasionally, Kit will snort or glower at something he says, getting a pale arched brow in return, or mutter something that makes Ash's perfect composure flicker for a moment.

(Interesting. Julian files that away for future reference.)

Julian asks the kind of questions that are honey-dipped and gentle on the surface, and barbed with wire under that, like bear traps laid for Ash to fall into. They're the kind of words that made even the fae shift in their seats once upon a time, and it works now, though the gig is up practically at once. Ah. It's not kind, but then again, neither is Julian. He doesn't care about kind. He cares about his family's well-being, and if Ash will disturb that, then Julian will do what he has to. As he always has.

Dru, though. Dru asks the kind of questions that Julian would expect from Ty, bursting with curiosity and colorful with information. They're utterly unexpected and driven by a logic Julian can't quite follow, though the method to their madness is completely undeniable. Kit gets a look in his eye at that, pained and yearning, but fondness quirks his mouth. Ash looks completely taken off guard for the first time, increasingly wide eyes and raised brows, bewilderment heavy on his face.

(He answers every question to some extent, though, no matter how silly said question is.)

The bigger question comes from Jem, though, who notices easily that if Dru and Ash are thick as thieves, in a curious sort of way that seems wholly new to them, then Ash and Kit are conjoined. It doesn't seem to be entirely conscious, but rather instinctive; they fall into step together, a natural tandem that's startling in its ease, their mouths pressed together in silence, even though the manner in which they looked at each other said volumes.

A conversation occurs through wriggling brows and expressive curves of the mouth. It is not a pleasant conversation. Nonetheless, Ash looks more at ease than he has since he got dragged through the portal, some unseen coil unraveling in some unseen way.

They shadow each other without a thought both before and after that, murmuring softly when they do talk, a gentle sort of tension to their endeavors. A fragile sense of tranquility, buzzing with electricity, tremendously tremulous. It is not easy to ignore; there is something about Kit and Ash that attracts the attention of all in their vicinity. It is an allure that is as much in their blood as it is in how they interact with each other. Quiet tension and a deliberate quest to side-step all the wires that would decimate them, an intimacy beyond words and an intensity that was hard to behold, draining, even when it seeped into each and every one of their interactions.

Even so, there's no animosity. In fact, there's even a curdled, complicated brand of fondness that they seem to reserve solely for each other. Bittersweet and surprisingly earnest, even if it is violently sharp. Even if it’s almost threatening in its careful handling, as though they were aware that their coexistence was more volatile than them being at odds with each other.

(Jem and Tessa observe it with a palpable kind of concern and an even deeper kind of understanding. There is something knowing there, and whether it is good or not, Julian can't tell yet. He isn't sure they can, either.)

(He does know that Dru has something to say about it, though, watching Kit with a cocked head and furrowed brows. It's reminiscent of Livvy and her intense, furious picking apart of all that came into their lives. The thought makes Julian flinch away from his own mind.)

(The pain never gets any less softer. Merely the slightest bit easier to breathe around.)

(Julian thinks about Ty, and thinks that he probably can't even do that. There's no breathing around hollow lungs.)

It's hard to understand and even harder to explain, which is why they all sit down to discuss Ash's presence—however momentary, given he seems rather divided on what his course of action ought to be—on their side of the world and what it means for them all. Usually, they’d discuss the matter with, say, Alec, the actual freaking consul, but desperate times.

Ash and Kit sit on the same sofa, half a cushion of space between them, a calculated valley of distance that they can nonetheless bridge at whim. Ash posture is perfect, spine ramrod straight and shoulders pulled back into a steady, his feet planted firmly on the floor, whereas Kit slouches on his end of the sofa, legs spread out in front of him and feet pointing in opposite directions, so that his head rests on the back of the couch and his foot settles an inch from Ash's. His arms spread over the back of the couch, hand primed to reach for Ash's head, and the other picks at the loose strings of the armrest.

They are, despite themselves, the picture of nonchalance. They've changed out of their ruined clothes—Kit had laughed at Ash dressed in Kit's own distinctly modern clothes and rid of his circlet, given that my, Ash, I see you're Jon Snow no more; how's it feel to join the rest of the peasantry?—and Kit balances his mug of tea between his thighs, Ash's own cradled between their hips. Oscar's ghost has settled by Kit's feet, panting happily at his return.

Their relaxation is matched by none, except perhaps Tessa and Jem, who simply looked relieved to see their son live and well, even if he now seems to have a shadow. Or a friend. It's hard to parse out from their behavior alone, I'm afraid.

(Dru doesn't look too concerned, either. She settles on one of the armchairs, her clothes exchanged for a pair of Tessa's, looking at Ash and Kit curiously from over the rim of her mug. Her gaze is intense and unyielding, probing, and rather excited, too.)

(Julian doesn't have a good feeling about this.)

Cue dark looks being exchanged and a distinctly odd feeling spreading through the room as Ash continues to be both remarkably uncooperative and tepid in a way that is as mild as it is warning. Worse still—Kit isn’t all that different when it’s him they’re questioning. He looks apologetic about it, just a bit, but even so, there is something implacable about it.

They're not belligerent, not at all, but they're not exactly nice, either. In fact, on paper, they're perfectly polite and forthcoming. The kind of song and dance Julian knows best from being both dancer and spectator, both musician and audience. They’re good at it, good as Julian is, and it comes to them so naturally he can’t help but be begrudgingly frustrated, even if he’s annoyed just the same.

The answers to the most basic of their questions are both unexpected and not.

They've known each other for a few years, give or take, by virtue of the powers that be. No, it was not intentional. Yes, they did know exactly who the other was, though it mattered little to either—here, it appears to be an admittance, because Kit pauses for a moment, and Ash's eyebrow twitches with the knowledge. They’d never met in the physical world before today. Nor did they intend to meet today, mind you. They don't consider each other a threat, either, if that needs pointing out; at least not quite, Ash tacks on somewhat humorously, like an afterthought, because fae habits evidently die hard.

(Kit snorts around a mouthful of tea, not agreeing but hardly disagreeing, and Ash seems perfectly at ease with that.)

Once all the questions Julian and Emma had to ask have been answered, skirted around, riddled or flat-out ignored, and Dru’s grocery list of queries has been answered to the best of Ash’s ability, Jem asks what they've all been not-subtly wondering:

"What, exactly, are you to each other?"

(The question would be dramatic and out of place, had Kit not jumped in front of Cortana with daggers held up and eyes ablaze before Dru could so much as twitch, holding the weight of Emma's strike with vicious surety, when she had turned it on Ash. Had he not yelled, he's with me!)

(If Ash had not just about slit the throat of the fae who'd tried to do the same to Kit, right in front of them all, with an ease that was chilling. With a certain vindication that Julian found eerily familiar, tucked under his bones on the best of days; not vengeance, not quite, but a protective snarl. One that could be ultimately worse than any vengeful rage.)

(If Kit had not pulled him through the portal, all rules and all carefully toed lines and all the things they conspicuously did not mention during their meetings be damned; burning through the barriers between them to grab at his bloody wrist and pull, because I can't protect you here, so come with me.)

(If Ash had not, against all odds and the thoughts warring on his face, let him.)

(If Kit had not made absolutely certain to keep him by his side at all times, as though fearing he'd have to take him and bolt, nodding at Dru when he took Ash's other side.)

But as it is, they've earned the question with their familiarity. With their mutual and wholly subconscious prioritizing of each other. With the way they interact with what can only be described as care and protectiveness.

(Dru perks up at the question, shifting in her seat, regarding them with Cheshire eyes that clearly say yes, do go on. Julian is once again reminded of Ty, eyes always pricked up to catch everything that happened around him, drinking the world down with brilliant wonder. God, he misses Ty, like Julian's got a yawning void where he ought to be.)

To their surprise, Kit does not divert them or immediately jump into an answer, as he has thus far. In fact, he leans back in his seat and shoots Ash a dry, somewhat weary look, as his face takes on a pensive veneer. His fingers begin to drum a steady pattern on the backrest, right behind Ash's head.

"Say, Ash—what are we to each other? Any ideas?" He asks, cocking a brow and quirking a corner of his mouth in a way that suggests mischief and remembrance. He looks utterly innocent, and Julian can tell at once he's taking the piss out of Ash, likely not for the first time.

The way Ash looks back at him can only be defined as withering. Julian is most definitely. "Perhaps one or two."

"Marvelous. Dazzle me," Kit said brightly, leaning back fully and spreading his arms grandly, brows rising like en exclamation mark.

(Tessa and Jem exchange a look, exasperated and unbearably fond. Herondales.)

Ash sighed, looking for all the world like he'd much prefer doing anything else, carefully balancing Heosphoros on his lap, where he'd been cleaning the blade of its muck for the entirety of the conversation. Julian got the impression that Kit was a handful that Ash had learned to pick his battles with.

(He isn't surprised.)

And then, looking Jem straight in the eye with arrogant disregard and a cold, calculating look that very much verges on defiant—

"He is mine."

Pause. Utter silence. The crowd is shocked. Not a word can be found among these halls. Even the ghosts have nothing to say.

Ash raises a brow, seemingly unimpressed by the response to a statement he found innocuous, and cocked his head. Like this, his chin was raised with distinct superiority, the line his jaw defiant without a shadow of a doubt, something in the way his eyes narrowed spelling out trouble.

(At once, Julian is reminded of the Kieran he first met, mad like the ocean and sharp like a blade. There is that royal elegance to Ash, too, Julian realizes; the look of a man who knows he is something, and who has adjusted accordingly.)

(He wonders if there is more to Ash, just like there was more to Kieran. He hopes so.)

Dru releases a rather inhumane sound as Jem and Tessa sputter, choking on her tea and coughing as Emma pounded on her back furiously and Julian handed her napkins. The glare she pins on Kit is harsh and accusing, as though she were considering chucking her mug at his head. She certainly has both the aim and the arm for it.

(Kit raises his hands in surrender, motioning at Ash with them, the universal sign for don't look at me, look at him.)

(Which she did. Just as furiously. With the Scowl of Doom.)

(If Ash had looked bewildered before, he looks so far out of his element now that Julian feels a surge of pity for him.)

(Up until the exact moment he looks at Kit like a lost puppy, tilting his head and nudging it softly toward Dru. He looks strangely alarmed, all in all, and now all Julian feels is amusement.)

(Kit makes placating gestures at them both, which work more than they really ought to. The way he looks at Dru, it communicates something. Enough that she settles back down, looking suspicious but satisfied.)

(Enough that Ash settles, too, once more the picture of calm.)

As Jem and Tessa exchanged furtive, concerned looks, Julian and Emma and Dru looking at each other as though to ask how much of that was fae speech and how much was straight up fact, Kit speaks. His voice lands somewhere between amused, withering and perhaps genuinely curious.

"Really?" He asks, poking Ash between the ribs with his stele, a deceptively careful movement. "Come on, Ash."

Ash is unfazed. "It's the truth, is it not?"

And, well. Kit says nothing to that. No agreement, no, but no disagreement, either. He pauses instead, his face twisting into an expression Julian cannot for the life of him read, which is at once pensive and disgruntled. It suggests a yes and a no, both and yet neither, or perhaps that he's still deliberating the merit of either.

But inaction is as good as action.

(And Ash knows that face on Kit, when aimed at him, enough that he knows it's an allowance. It is, if nothing else, an acquisition.)

(With them, there is more said in the unsaid, more words in their silences.)

(And they've learned to read them well.)

So Ash nods, says, "Splendid. Now, if I may," and methodically returns to his polishing.

"Huh," Dru says after a while, surprised and yet not, and then sips from her tea.

Nothing gets said for a little while longer, and thus Kit spoils Oscar and drinks his tea.

Kit read ASOIAF.

Yes. Read.

He had to do something in his free time and why not read the books to the show everyone and their mother was slowly losing their shit for.

He did read them. It took him weeks but he did.

When he sees season 6-8 come out, he will promptly become homicidal.

(Yes, he agrees with the L + R = J theories. Hence him calling Ash, of all things, Jon Snow.)

(This is the epitome of an inside joke, given he's the only one aside from Dru who's actually either read or seen the damn thing.)

(She watches it as it comes out. Kit is appalled.)

(Finally, Tessa says, you know what it's like to be me.)

(Kit just stares at her in open, unabashed misery.)

The aftermath of the war in snippets.

As the dust settles and the body count begins, as nephilim mourn and downworlders weep, as Kieran frantically tries to round up the faeries safely, the world goes on turning. Blissfully, silently, blindly, as it always does. It stops for no one. It turns for no one. It simply moves on.

(Somewhere, Clary and Jace embrace, battered and bruised and bleeding entirely too much, but alive, so fucking alive. They hold hands and their rings clang, and somewhere in the distance, Simon releases a primal sound of relief and all but launches himself at them. They all land in a tangle of limbs, squawking indignantly and laughing and then crying, all holding on to each other because you're alive, I thought I'd lost you, I thought—)

(Simon hugs Clary like she'll go up in a cloud of smoke if he lets her go, and she hugs back like he'll forget who she is without her touch, and Jace embraces them both like they're his entire fucking world.)

(In the distance, Isabelle says they're here, come on! And then it's her, too, crying into Jace's neck and crushing her chest to Simon's back and leaving her hand imprinted on the back of Clary's neck. And they let her and they grab at her, too, and they're okay.)

(When Alec appears, his entire body is shaking and his bow clatters out of his hands as he crumples to his knees before them. There's an ugly gash at his cheek and his forehead is darkening with bruises and he looks like crap, but he's smiling even as tears run down his face, as his knees bracket around Simon's and his chest supports Clary and his arms wrap around all of them and his hand squeezes hard at Isabelle's shoulder. As his temple knocks into Jace's, both of them bloody and teary and disgusting, and all of them happy and miserable and breathing.)

(Magnus is sighing as he comes upon them, but all the sighs in the world couldn't hide the way his smile quivers with relief. None of the put-upon exhaustion in the planet could hope to make them not understand what it means that Magnus Bane drops to his knees in the muck and the debris and touches them all gently, messing with Simon's hair and wiping blood from Jace's cheek and gently squeezing Isabelle's wrist and booping Clary's nose, tucking his chin into Alec's hair. The fondness with which he says, What am I going to do with you?)

(Somewhere, they are alive and for now, that's all that matters.)

The Silent Brothers struggle to help all the injured, the entire battlefield an open wound, iratzes and prayers and blood stinging the air like heavenly fire. Wails cut through the air, grief and rage and pleading alike. The silence is sometimes like the wound has already become a tomb. It certainly has enough bodies for it.

In some corner of the battlefield, Cristina helps Kieran do what he promised Kit and Alec—he gets the fae together and the fuck away as safely and quickly as he can, hair flickering between a frazzled, electric blue and a thick, fearful black, white licking through its depths like sea foam, the Queen's crown tucked over it haphazardly, a permanent frown on his beautiful features.

Cristina tries to smile, tries to be reassuring and encouraging, she does, but every few moments, her eyes flicker to the spot where she last saw Emma—she thinks about the grim, fierce determination on her face, of the way she'd held Julian's hand with finality and said Cristina's name like a eulogy and feels her heart drop like a rock—and her face curdles like milk.

(Sometimes, her eyes will flutter instead to the spot where Mark last stood, panicked eyes and longing and vicious determination, planting a kiss on Kieran's mouth like smoldering embers as he cradled his face with the most tender of ferocity, staring into his eyes like a promise. Kieran had looked gutted.)

(She understood why when Mark kissed her, passionate and utterly desperate, so much yearning and adoration on his quivering lips and dry tongue that she'd trembled with it. He'd held her like precious china, like the warmth of childhood he knew would be stolen from him. He looked at her eyes like he was trying to memorize them, like they were the last thing he ever wanted to see.)

(When he pulls away, chasing after the trail Aline and Helen had carved for themselves, going right into the heart of the battle—where Dru and Ty are, where Julian and Emma were going, where the world would either end or survive—Cristina thinks, with a despair so strong it makes her ill, don't you dare leave me.)

(Sometimes, Kieran and her will meet eyes when they look at the same spot, gazes haunted with the same fear, terrified that their Mark will be another lost name in this war.)

(Terrified that they'll have to live on without him, that they'd have to bury him. That they'd have to go back to a home where he was but a phantom in their halls.)

(They both look away.)

And then she hears it. "Tina! Kier!"

Cristina might have twisted her ankle with how fast she turned, had she not been a shadowhunter. She's half-convinced that, from the sound Kieran's neck made, he might have dislocated it with how fast he turned his head.

There, booking it through the field and to them, is Mark. Bleeding sluggishly and so dirty she can hardly make out the lines of his runes upon his skin, but grinning widely and alive, running not for life but for his loves, running like not even Lucifer himself could stop him.

And Cristina isn't sure which of them does it first, but before she knows what's happening, both her and Kieran are running, too, shouting at the faeries to continue as they go in shaking voices; running toward him, running right over every obstacle, and into his open arms.

The clash is painful and ugly and she's going to have bruises for days to come without a series of iratzes. Kieran's teeth clack together when they all slam together. Mark accidentally crashes his chin against Cristina's forehead. They slide through the mud and only Kieran's ridiculous strength keeps them standing, a hand fisted in the back of Mark's shirt and an arm around Cristina's waist, and then he squeezes so hard Cristina feels her ribs creak.

But Mark's eyes boggle with it as Kieran connects their foreheads, looking for all the world like he might dissolve into tears, the black bleeding out of his hair and giving way to pale, sweet baby blues and white tangs, as he keeps whispering, "You've come back to me, you've come back to us."

Cristina only realizes she's crying when she realizes how hot her face is as she buries it in Mark's neck, an arm around his waist and his blood seeping into the scrapes of her skin, a hand digging into the back of Kieran's neck, and then she's laughing because by Raziel, they've done it. They've done it.

They're going home. They're all going home. They're all okay.

And Mark laughs in return and kisses Cristina's tears away, just as desperate as before but no longer afraid, no longer a goodbye; now, it's a hello, a here I am, a I'm never leaving you again. Kieran is fierce with how he kisses all over Mark's face, his fingers quivering bruises into Cristina's waist, his eyes squinted so his tears won't fall, and Mark stops him with a press of the mouth. It's hardly a kiss. It's a shared breath.

But it does the trick. Kieran settles. They all settle, melting into each other, ankle-deep in mud and bleeding and in the middle of the end of a war, but in each other's arms.

"Never leave us again," Kieran hisses and Mark smiles, beams, and says, "Never. Never."

(Cristina believes him.)

(And then she sees Helen.)

Elsewhere, Helen carries her wife in her arms and her brother on her back, whispering you can do this, we're almost there, stay with me, stay with me. Don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me.

Julian's head lolls against her shoulder, blood dripping steadily down his arms and over Helen's skin, onto Aline's cheeks. He's utterly limp, breath unsteady and hot against Helen's neck, mouthing words even like this—Livia, Ty, Dru, Tavvy, Helen, Mark, Emma, Emma, Emma—and even so, Helen can feel the tears spring to her eyes, as she says, "Jules, hey, Jules—please, please, please."

In her arms, Aline is pale and cold, breath coming out in small, soft puffs, hand loose where it'd been putting pressure against the red blooming across her abdomen. Helen can see the rune that bound them on her chest, where her shirt is torn, can see the place where their hearts became one forever.

(Forever cannot end today, it can't.)

She looks beautiful, even like this. Helen loves her like she's never loved anyone. She loves them both more than anything. She loves them all and she's terrified that this will be the end, that this will be the last time she can see their faces, can feel their warmth.

"Please," she whispers, running faster than she ever has, thinking of Ty and Dru and Emma left behind, thinking of Tavvy with Max and Rafael and Mina. Thinking of Livvy, of how she'd lost her, of how she cannot lose any of them, of how she'd die without them.

Thinking of Mark, Mark—

"MARK!" she screams, screams for all she's worth, glimpsing him in the distance. "MARK!"

He turns, at once, because he'd know her voice anywhere. His smile is blinding, happiness the most beautiful thing Helen's ever seen on him, and she will always remember the moment it slips away, replaced by the heart-stopping horror, the bone-breaking terror, that she feels in her own chest. She can see the panic in his eyes. She can see him run. She can see Cristina and Kieran follow, because they'd chosen them, they'd all chosen each other, family over blood.

And she says, "Please, Jules, please—stay with me, okay, we're almost there, Mark is here, you'll be okay, you'll be okay—"

A beat, a spike of fear, more blood pooling against Helen's chest. "Aline, love, my soul, my beating heart, come on, come on, we're only getting started. We've got forever ahead of us, okay? Stay with me. Stay with me."

She whispers those three little words over and over again, long after Mark and her have gotten their precious charges to the Silent Brothers, Kieran having carved a path for them with vicious determination. Long after they are healing. Long after Mark touches her hair and cradles her to his chest and says, they'll be okay.

(Helen holds him like she held them, panic and love and desperation, and says, stay with me.)

(Mark kisses her forehead and gently says, forever.)

In the middle of the battlefield, where fae and downworlders and nephilim clash, Ash blazes through it, thinking what are you doing, Ash, what are you doing.

You're making a mistake, you're making a mistake. You're betraying the only person who's ever loved you for you, you fool. How can you do this to him?

(Because maybe love isn't letting him set the world aflame.)

And he's brutal and ruthless, fierce as he fights back against Janus's troops, water as he treads through the ranks of those that used to follow him. As he turns his back on the only person not to abandon him.

(Kit's face flashes across his face, the fierce set of it when he jumped in front of Emma Carstairs and Cortana for Ash. The pain in his voice when he said don't die before they shot into separate parts of this battle.)

(Even though he hadn't known who Ash would choose in the end, what mistake he'd inevitably make, he'd wanted him alive. He'd pleaded for it.)

(And Ash had said stay alive.)

But still, his mind says, don't do this, don't do this, please don't do this.

And maybe that's why, when he soars up into the sky—a point of vantage, a way to see what's coming—he doesn't feel the threat, doesn't do the sole thing he's been trained to do for years, until he hears the familiar whizz edging his way. The ruthless, sizzling burn.

The pure, solid iron heading his way, with the cold dread of certain doom.

(Ash has always been remarkable, not because of who he is, but because of what he's been made to be. It's been his sole virtue in the eyes of each of his captors, the reason behind his gilded cages and his pretty titles and all the status that only ever amounted to loneliness and the name weapon.)

(Remarkable didn't always mean good. Sometimes, it just meant outside of the ordinary in the worst of ways.)

(Like the fact that, tragically, inconveniently, only half fae or not—iron was poison to him.)

Ash barely begins to dive and drop, a desperate attempt at eluding the inevitable, when the net lands. It's heavy and noisy and uncomfortable, clattering like plated armor; it tightens on impact, twisting its way into his body and pressing his thrashing wings into his back so harshly he idly wonders whether it'll snap his spine. It seems plausible.

Anything seems plausible, really, as the iron begins to sizzle audibly along his skin, burnt flesh and the acerbic, anemic scent of cold iron filling his nose. It's so strong he gags, fingers scrabbling around the holes of the net, looking frantically for a way out of it even as they begin to blister and peel.

And then the chain wraps around his ankle, squeezing like a vice with an awful crack that jolts all the way up to his hip and down his toes—

And with a sharp yank, Ash falls.

(He goes through the air so quickly, it seems honey-dipped in his head, sluggish and unbearably thick in its descent. He goes with hands clawing through the net, like they could cut through the air and find a cloud to grab onto.)

(Heosphoros falls with him, because irony is the one thing to never fail him.)

(The burns darken and deepen as he goes, the flames fanned by the chaos, and he knows it will consume him, because he can actually feel the pain begin to run its course. Ash doesn't feel pain like normal people do. Not at all.)

(But iron has always been a weakness of his, the best way to keep him subdued and cowed, and now, it may very well kill him.)

(The hilarity is not lost on him; a winged thing kept in a gilded cage bites its master, and winds up knocked out of the sky it'd finally soared into moments after. Winds up entangled in a net, a mobile cage, because if he cannot be their bird of prey, he will be hunted instead.)

(Ash sees the blood begin to well between his fingers, where the iron chains pull at his flesh, and wonders if this is what Kit saw back in Lake Lyn.)

(The thought is oddly comforting.)

The crash is a brutal tangle of limbs, as he barrels into people, both live and dead, and through heaps of mud. As he's dragged through them, the chain at his ankle pulls taut, intent on forcing his bones out of his body as his hands claw at the ground under him.

And then there's deafening, all-encompassing silence as he finally, finally jerks to a stop, whiplash threatening to overcome him. There's white nose, so that Ash can only hear his own breath, the unsteady beat of his heart.

Fuck, he thinks, patting at the ground for Heosphoros, getting his hands and knees under him even as they lock, trembling with exertion.

The world swims around him, turned red by the blood running hot down his face, turned blurry by everything else. His nose is washed out with blood and dirt, burnt out by iron.

But he hears their footsteps, wet and heavy in the mood. He feels their weight, their finality.

And because he can't fight, because he can hardly string a thought together with the net digging deeper and deeper into his skin, burning like hot coals against it, Ash does does the one thing he can do:

He digs his hands and knees into the ground, and crawls.

(Ash remembers, distantly, a pristine room in a world full of heat and sand and misery. A world filled with despair, with only one shining star, only one saving grace—Janus.)

(He remembers crawling in a training room, hands and knees and spitting blood. Not crawling from the pain, but instead toward his sword, toward survival.)

(He remembers what it got him.)

Laughter explodes behind him, lilting and fair like all fae voices are, and he scrunches his eyes shut.

(It is the same now as it was then.)

The chain around his ankle tugs again, a sharp pull, and his leg goes out from under him. He narrowly avoids face planting with an elbow in the mud, gritting his teeth against the clattering of the net and how it burns more steadily against his skin.

Another yank, then, this time flipping him in place, landing him on his back with a groan, trying to curl away from the iron at once.

The laughter fades into a giggle, he can register that through the rushing of his blood; he can register the sound of armor, heavy and clattering, ornate.

And then the presence of a foot upon his ankle, dainty and purposeful, and then cruel, dropping all its weight upon him until his bone goes snap.

Ash jerks, whimpers, but he doesn't scream. The pain is real, realer than anything, but it's familiar, too. Pain is easy. Pain is what he experiences every day, one way or the other, and if he cuts off its flow, if he dams its reach, it's more sensation than anything.

(Except iron.)

The toe nudges curiously at his ankle, at the net, jostling to see what it gets. To see the new lines burn through him.

Ash bares his teeth, a hiss building, primal and furious.

The fae, or rather the fae, his mother's fae, the Rider she took from the King, her little treasure—

They smile, wide and wicked and terrible, and Ash snarls and lands a kick against their knee.

It's harsh enough he feels something give, sees their face pale for a second and then thin with rage, their smile falling at once.

Ash tips his head back with a pant, fingers opening and closing, curling into fists and loosening into calm palms. All he needs is a moment. All he needs is—

Their voice is a slithering whisper, clouding like smoke, when they say, "It is time for your blood to run, boy king."

(My boy king, Ash's mother had crooned, the cool hands fitting round the sharpness of his face faint as the touch of a ghost. There was no glow to them, no buzz of power, no rise and no fall and no ebb and no flow. Nothing. Nothing at all.)

(Just the emptiness of a well growing dry and a field growing barren, with only a whisper of longing remaining from the screams of inclemency there had been once.)

(Ash knew that she was a blaze, that she was a fury, a force as fierce as any storm. It did not matter that she was fading right before his eyes. She could still turn the world to ash, just to make sure she took it with her when she went. Just to make sure she won one last time.)

(And yet he knew, standing in front of her, her hands gentle and soft and dead on his face, that it did not matter what she could do. It did not matter what she wanted to do.)

(Because the grass was greener where Ash stood, and she would realize one day. They all would. They always did. And that day, Ash would find out how much love was really worth.)

(But until then—until then, he stood in the damp, cold darkness of a drying well and let her cradle his face with motherly affection he wasn't entirely sure she was capable of.)

(He looked at her blue eyes and her red hair and the terrible beauty of her face, the delicate brass of the petals encircling her temples, and memorized. Wished that the Mnemosyne rune would let him pull this image up again and again and again, no matter what.)

(My boy king, the Seelie Queen said, smiling a smile that is not soft and is not kind, one that is loving nevertheless, even though there was no warmth to it. My king of ashes.)

(Born to rule the night and the blazing stars, to rule among the dead and the ash, to rule the sand of the rise and fall of time. To wrought destruction unlike any other.)

(Born to raze the world in the name of glory.)

(Ash thought of the grass, greener under his feet, and of the visage he saw when he shut his eyes every night. Blue eyes, the sky that had been taken from him, a watercolor depth Ash could not grasp; a mole like ink blotting over the freckles of his skin, so very like the stars he'd all but forgotten in Thule, the constellations Janus taught him dutifully; a crooked grin full of sharp teeth and brimming with something Ash wanted to unearth and tuck inside his ribs, a shape so alarmingly familiar he could carve it into the face of the world. A rune, one echoed at Ash's own pulse, a twin of the lines burning on his wrist, a ghost of the gift upon his veins.)

(Thought of the visage he saw every morning when he opened his eyes—golden eyes, the very sun burning in Ash's palms, as sharp and cold as the first knife he was taught to use, the first time he understood give instead of take; a smile, such a wide and strange thing for Ash to love, a gaping wound on a face like the fall of an empire. A scar across the peak of a collarbone, a ravine in holy aureate land, and a chipped incisor, crumbling marble soon to turn to powder; blood-stained cuffs, a lesson never learned, and raised veins, lines that burned with heavenly fire in the world Ash was born into.)

(Careful pianist's hands, glorious and indelicate and always crusty with blood, even though the piano sat around their house collecting dust and the knives went auburn with rust.)

(He thought beyond night and day. Thought of this land, greener where he stood, greener still in his dreams—greener, perhaps, because of him.)

(He thought long and hard.)

(And he smiled that same terrible smile, the devastating sharpness of his canines and the plush curve of his mouth and all the destinies woven into one tiny gesture. All the lives it carried.)

(King of ashes indeed, Mother.)

(He sees a flash over their shoulder, black hair and grey eyes and a terrible set of sharp brows before it all fades into glamour, and thinks, and thus he comes.)

"Is that so?" He drawls, beginning to feel the threads he ignores pull taut against his fingers, the pressure building, building, building—

"Mayhaps you've got me confused with yourself, child of Mannan."

Heosphoros comes hurtling through the air with terrible finality and wicked aim, cutting and bursting through everything in its path, the way Morgensterns and their blades always do.

(The way Ash is willing to, whether it makes him a monster or not, for the faces that flash before him.)

Gathering all his strength, all the charm simmering in his blood, all the magic he's learned to harness and keep tucked into his bones, he commands—"Unhand me and release me, Rider."

The effect is instantaneous, as the pleasant drawl of his voice rackets up to a hundred miracles, unfurling into something beautiful and sweet and irresistible. A tide that, when directed, surpasses all in the world but one.

(No amount of command has ever affected Kit worth squat.)

The Rider freezes, hand going slack around the chain as their eyes blow wide with panic, and Ash kicks out at their ankle, knocking it out from under them.

He feels a tug at the net, unfamiliar hands and a cool, reassuring presence he doesn't trust, and then it's lifted sharply and pulled away, leaving relief to begin to settle like a balm across his flesh.

Ash doesn't question it, doesn't question what it means, and simply opens his hand up to Heosphoros's hilt as it lands, settling at once, at home with its owner.

It's quick work; the tip of the sword pressed against the chink in the armor, between the third and fourth rib, and then deeper, deeper, deeper.

The gurgling is awful, but familiar. Ash pulls out his dripping sword, laying a foot against a throat and pressing down, and says, "Heosphoros has some soul yet."

And then, silence. The battle rages. His ears ring. There's sensation all over his body, raw and aching, and he turns away from it, trying to wash away his disorientation as he turns to where his net pools at his feet, bloody and horrid.

"Tiberius," he tells the presence, and the glamour falls. Ty looks like one of the tragic statues Janus told him about, terrible and beautiful and vengeful.

But he'd helped Ash, had worked with him, and Kit loved him. Loved him enough that there need be no words for it to be known.

So Ash says, because like this, today, he can see Livia Blackthorn’s outline in the smoke, because he does not like debts: "If you still wish to rouse her back, you should go. Time slips away, Tiberius. The wicked powers won't await you."

Grey eyes widen, fixed at Ash's chin instead of his eyes, dread and concern exploding behind them. It's almost charming, how much he cares, the way his hand slaps over the heron necklace peeking over his gear like it's a clock and he can feel it ticking.

"Don't you die," Ash says, runing a series of iratzes into his skin, before he thinks of what he saw in Lake Lyn, of the color of the sky in those dreams, and walks right past Tiberius.

He hears him leave, quick footsteps, following nightmares instead of dreams. Chasing after ghosts, unknown as to the creation of more.

Ash stumbles toward the clearing where he can see the flames of Kit's magic rage, so close to the angelic fury heavenly fire wages, and thinks I'll run, I'll walk, I'll crawl, but stay alive.

(And he sees two blonds in his head and wonders which of the two he's talking to.)

(Later, as he staggers like a drunk, vision blurred and red and awfully hazy, listening to the faint sense of direction in his mind that leads him to the blazing grounds, he hears, "Ash? Ash!")

(His heart freezes solid.)

(Tessa Gray runs into his field of vision in all her splendor, hair pulled back into a sharp, tight bun and the lines of her faces deep with concern and fear, deeper still with determination. Jem stands by her side, looking uncomfortable with the seraph blade in his hand, but majestic still. The nephilim grace in him won't disappear, no matter what he wants from it, and right now, it glimmers like marble along his angles. His eyes say why he's here—his family, his son. Both their eyes do.)

(And looking at them, both of them, who would kill and die for Kit, he feels an awful sense of fatality consume him.)

(And yet.)

("Christopher," he gasps, coughs, holding a hand to his ribs, feeling blood pool and wondering where it came from. His wings are heavy and crooked and twisted into odd, terrible angles, but all he can say is Kit's name.)

(All he can do is point at the clearing in the distance, bursting with flashes of light as its flames brighten.)

(They see it, too, and their eyes go haunted and fierce, at once, exchanging a look that says as much as any conversation would.)

(And then their resolve hardens into something solid, fierce titanium for all knives and swords and arrows to bounce off of. It's unwavering, not unafraid but brave, not unbreakable but rather unyielding.)

(They're ready.)

(Jem wraps an arm around Ash's waist, hauling him upright and dragging half his weight as they rush.)

(Ash can feel his heartbeat, his warmth. He's battle-hot and his pulse is battle-fast. Different from what he usually hears when he focuses enough.)

(He wonders if Kit will be like this when they get to him. Or if he'll be fever-hot or bloodloss-cold.)

(Cortana is a sword of mercy. Emma is a woman of justice—well, her version of it—for the most part.)

(But Janus is not a merciful man and Kit isn't, either.)

(As they walk through the smoking trees, Ash hears the whispers licking at his ears, the power seeping through his heels, tracing its way up his bones. It's slow and possessive, suggestive, promising warmth and comfort, so enticing in its familiarity.)

(It's a hissing voice, the wind of Faeri and yet harsher, hotter. The drip-drip-drip of adamas, like a seraph blade taking a life of its own.)

(The entire clearing has taken a life of its own, and it embraces him like a ghost, drawing him into his arms by slithering its way into his lungs. Every breath is heady with blood and roses abloom, sugar and summer rain. The slightest hint of a burnt-out match.)

(Something Kit and yet not, uncomfortably so.)

(It knocks the breath out of him, the strength of the power, the raw weight of it sitting on his lungs. It knocks his legs out from under him, too, sending him crashing against a tree before Jem stumbles them both upright, alarm dotting his scarred cheekbones.)

(Ash's head is spinning so hard, feeling light as paper and intoxicated, that he barely catches Jem saying, "Go, get our boy. I've got him. I've got him.")

(He doesn't catch Tessa's response. Just Jem trying to get his attention, trying to ask him what's wrong, applying healing runes over and over.)

(Just the way the clearing's whispers all converge into the same thing: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I love you, I love you.)

(He doesn't catch anything beyond the way the world blurs.)

(He does catch Tessa's scream, though, horror and fear and pain. The most tortured scream he's heard in maybe all his life. A wail, really.)

(Ash struggles against the haze taking over him, struggles against Jem, straining toward the clearing, and Jem follows, because his better judgement is clouded by his desperation.)

(And when he sees the blood, hears Drusilla's screams and Tessa's frantic words, he feels Jem's arm fall away from him.)

(He feels the world fall down on him.)

(What have you done, he asks nobody and gets no answer.)

At the heart of the corpse of this battle, innocence wails.

Kit lays in the middle of a copse turned into an inferno by his power, pale flames shivering along the trees and scorching their way through the earth, fading gently along with his rage. Washed out by his relief, by the thought he's dead, he's dead, until only the ashes fluttering to the ground and the blackened remains could tell of what had happened there.

(What am I gonna tell Ash? Kit thinks, remembering the way Ash would have done anything for Janus, the way green eyes sparkled with affection around him.)

(The thought makes cold dread pool in his spine, a hurt so real that it almost capsizes his lungs.)

(Or maybe that's the sword.)

Emma's hands flutter around where Cortana sticks out of his body, crimson beginning to darken its inscription in wet, dark streaks. They're shaking, he notices, bloodstained hands that took Janus's life easily, not in revenge, but in protection.

(Bloodstained hands that had included him in that protection, brown eyes widening and bursting with primal horror as the illusion rippled, faded, and the truth was revealed.)

(As Kit held Janus in place with a hand around Phaesphoros at his neck, blood dripping down the black blade and Kit's neck, tendrils of white energy spreading like veins and locking them together, just as Cortana ran them both through.)

(He'd deceived her. Illusions were such tricky things, hardly instinctive the way destruction and fire were to him, but it was easy to fool the mind while in battle. It was so focused on surviving, so focused on eliminating its enemy, sometimes it failed to realize that something was amiss.)

(And so when Kit's blood sprays over her front and the grass, over their feet—Converse and combat boots, their lives themselves summarized through footwear—and his body fades back into existence right in front of her eyes, all he does is smile with bloody teeth and say, "I'm sorry.)

(A clean blow from Cortana is as good as a death sentence. Janus died with frightening ease, one of Kit's daggers in his lung and Cortana having crushed right through him. So much rage and so much fire and so much death, and he ended not with a scream, but with a whimper, crawling away to no avail.)

("Ash," he'd said with his last breath, blood slipping between his lips in awful, gurgling sounds. "Ash.")

(And Kit had thought, falling to his knees as Dru screamed at the edge of the clearing—pinned beneath a tree and bleeding as she was, her sword broken in half and her face streaked with blood, panic in her eyes—so you loved him.)

(Janus had loved Ash more than anyone had loved Ash of their own free will; that much, Kit had always known. He'd never doubted that.)

(But he'd also known it was the kind of love that spread like corrosion, withering its way through every nerve-end with pitiful desperation. Janus loved Ash, yes, and he loved him in the terrible ways father did, broken and ruined by their pasts, and inevitably ruining all else, too, like they had been.)

(Janus loved Ash more than anyone had ever loved him, and he would destroy Ash with it, and Ash would let him.)

(He'd destroy the whole world, use Ash to do it, and Ash would let him. Because he thought that was what love was. Because it was all he had.)

(Just like Kit had once thought his father loved him, somehow, because it was all he’d ever known.)

(And Kit thinks, flopping onto his back with a wet cough, lungs filling with fluid, blood gurgling through his mouth and down the sides of his face—I wish you could have loved him right.)

(And isn't that the crux of who Kit and Ash both are, at the end of the day?)

(Johnny, Sebastian, the King, the Queen, Janus. Who else would they add to the list?)

(Kit laughs as Emma's voice registers only as a panicked blur, Dru's screams beginning to melt into memories, the fires dimming.)

"It's okay," Kit tries to say through the globs of blood obstructing his throat, grabbing onto Emma's hands with raw, split-open palms, Phaesphoros having left him oozing black blood. "It's okay."

Emma shoves his shirt up and away as best she can, beginning to press her stele down onto his skin, forcing it to stillness, forcing the lines to be sharp and precise. She pushes it down harshly enough he wonders idly if it'll burn right through his skin, enough for it to be almost as painful as Cortana jostling. He knows better than to squirm away from it, though, and he stills the instinct and gurgles through a moan of pain—I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, she whispers, and he mutters back deliriously, okay, 's okay, 'm alright—as he feels the runes begin to sink in. He knows them, can recognize their tracings upon his skin.

(Mendelin and amissio, siblings meant to keep him alive for as long as possible, meant to keep his body producing a little bit of blood for every drop that sinks into the ground under him.)

(It's interesting. Even now, as he fades in and out of the world, as his body fights against the cumulus of injuries, he can feel the clearing whisper like the land in Faeri does. His power has coated it, has made it come alive, and his blood is feeding it. It is giving it a voice.)

(Kieran will have to clean up his mess. Kit feels a bit bad for him. He should have killed both him and Ash when he had the chance; lord knows his life would be easier if he had.)

(But the fact that he didn't is exactly why Kit gave him the crown that now sits upon his brow.)

"A Silent Brother, get a Silent Brother!" Dru screams from the edge of the clearing, drawing Strength runes and Endurance runes and so many more runes Kit's mind can't entirely piece together right now over her arms, trying to shove the tree off her leg, trying to unpin herself, to help.

Emma jolts, at that, already scrambling to get her feet under her, but there's conflict in her. Dru or Kit? Who does she help? Who does she save right this moment?

"Go!" Dru snarls, face blazing, determination and fury and fear. "I'll be fine, go!"

(Her eyes are wide with desperation. They're feverish with it. Abruptly, Kit thinks of her entire world almost ending so many times. Of her mother taken by disease, her home attacked by Endarkened, her father gone because of Sebastian, her brother and sister stolen from her by the law; of Julian and Emma turned into something not-themselves, of Kit so far away not even touch could ground him, of Ash caught in the web of Janus's love, of Livvy and the Mortal Sword.)

(And he thinks, I'm sorry.)

(It's all he can say to her for becoming another memory that will haunt her at night, another phantom only she can see.)

(For becoming somebody else that left her.)

(And ah, yeah. That's what he'll tell Ash. He'll tell him the truth.)

(I'm sorry.)

"It's okay," Kit says again, as Emma promises she'll come back with help, as she squeezes his fingers tightly enough to break them, saying stay with me, hold on, Kit, I'll be back, I'll be right back.

As her fingers slide through his slippery ones, as she turns away and runs, a blur of gold, Kit's hand begins to fall to the ground and he tells her back, "I'm sorry."

Looking at her back as she runs, torn black gear and bloody skin and swirling runes, he feels oddly reminded of a past not entirely his own. Emma's golden hair looks red for but a moment and she looks smaller, somehow, but just as bright. Kit blinks hazy eyes and it's just her, just Emma, and then it's just the mouth of the clearing, ash falling like memories.

Ash falling like slivers of silver, the moon itself peeling and pooling around them in piles of filth. It'd be pretty if it were snow. It'd be poetic if he weren't dying in front of one of his best friends, as she shouts and begs and breaks her own bones trying to get to him.

In the light, it's the same shade of grey as Ty's eyes.

"I'm sorry," Kit mutters again, tears beginning to bead his own.

(Ty, he thinks, with a regret as deep as the ocean itself. Ty, whom he's loved for so long he can't imagine stopping; Ty, whom he would have followed anywhere; Ty, whom he failed.)

(Ty, who resented him and hated him and forgave him; Ty, who calls him Watson without the easy familiarity of their time in the Institute, but still pronounces it like the title belongs only to Kit, reluctant though it may be.)

(Ty, who will still choose Livvy. Kit, who can't blame him, who has come to expect it, who's learning to understand that he can't save him.)

(Kit can pay the consequences for Ty's choices, the same way he would the ones of his own. But he can't stop him. He can love him, but the truth is that maybe he'll never have him.)

(He can love and be loved by him, and understand that Ty will burn the world down for a chance to see Livvy's smile even once.)

(Kit was right to stop him. He was wrong to help him. Even if he understood the why.)

(Now, though, he wonders what he'd do if it was Mina he lost. Tessa. Jem.)

(Ash.)

(He wonders what atrocities he'd commit, what rules he'd break.)

(He thinks he'd shatter through them all. He thinks nobody would be able to save him, then.)

(And Kit thinks, staring at the spot where the smoke meets the sky, bronze as though to summon wicked powers, as though to rouse one last chance for rebirth—please don't kill yourself trying to save what can't be saved, Sherlock.)

(They'd miss you.)

(I'd miss you.)

(...Will you miss me?)

In the clearing, it's the body that plunges a hand into Ash's chest and squeezes his heart to pieces.

It used to belong to his friend, once, he thinks. It's hard to tell. Not because of the blood, no, nor because of the way he seems empty, drained, like someone sucked the life out of him.

It's because of how fragile he looks, crumpled onto his side, weak and small and looking distinctly like a child. Golden eyes have gone wide with fear and dull, duller than he's ever seen them, dull like...like death.

Kneeling before Janus's body, empty of the life it never lacked, even when it lacked almost everything else, Ash feels spectacularly screwed.

Screwed out of today, out of tomorrow, out of every day he's lived and every day he's to live.

Screwed by life itself, actually, because Janus was the one thing he'd ever truly had. The one thing he had left. The one thing he'd cherished.

And now he's a dried up, crimson-dyed husk, like a withered flower on the Seelie Court. Empty, dead and gone.

His hand is reaching for Phaesphoros even like this. His fingertips were centimeters away, really, close enough to brush the cool, familiar metal. Close enough his breath might have fogged up against the hilt. There's a metaphor there somewhere, certainly. A really good one, even.

Ash can't grasp it, though. He can't grasp a damn thing. Feathers tremble their way free from his mangled wings and fall into the pool of coagulating blood. Fall over the hole pierced straight through Janus's solar plexus. Fall and fall like Ash's tears don't.

All he can do is stare, hands sunk deep into the grass, like maybe it'll make this right. Like it'll make sense of it.

But Janus is still gone.

Ash can't touch him. Won't. If he does, he might crumble to dust before him. He might fade. It might end. It might be over.

(It already is. It already is. It has been for a while.)

(It has been for a long time.)

Drusilla has stopped screaming. Or maybe Ash can't hear her over the white noise that led him, staggering and possessed, to his knees before Janus. Maybe Tessa is wailing still, but he can't tell.

Maybe—

The clearing is shifting. Changing. Just a bit. Like the ground under them—him, under him, is moving just a bit.

Enough to draw his eyes away from Janus—his body, from Janus's body, fuck—and the sight a little further away.

Ash had been breathing before. Curious. He'd thought he hadn't, but he was wrong.

He was wrong, because he stops breathing now, when his eyes meet Kit's.

They're the same startling blue they were the first time Ash saw him in Faeri, commanding all of his attention with ease, even if Ash could disregard it just as simply. Glimmering with the same power, swirling with the same recognition.

Except they're wide this time, wet with tears and hazy with pain. His face is pale, lacking in all color, quivering with strain. He looks almost unrecognizable. Almost.

(As it is, Ash would recognize him blind, deaf, dead. He'd recognize him anywhere. Anywhere.)

The scorched dirt and grass around him are blackened with blood, reflecting the blue flames of magic Tessa is helplessly pressing into his stomach, around where Cortana is sticking out, though it doesn't seem to be doing much. Though it seems to be a last ditch effort, the kind Ash knows for a fact she has to try.

He looks ethereal, already half-gone, and still Ash can feel his presence buzz. So much more softly than usual, a whisper to his usual scream.

Ash can't describe the feeling that strikes him, then, can't think of a thing other than no.

"Ash," Kit gurgles, the sound wet and barely coherent, blood slipping from behind his teeth. His hand lifts and reaches toward Ash, bloodstained and shaky.

It's his right hand. His right hand. The currents between them, the ones that always pull them together, they whisper, thicken like they always do.

(Ash sees his Enkeli rune, over the slow jump of his pulse, because it's his right hand.)

And Ash, who can't get his feet under him, who isn't sure he'll ever be able to rise from this, isn't sure he'll ever be able to recover—

He crawls. Hands and knees in the dirt, in the grass, dragging over every burn, smearing blood over every place where Janus and Emma and Drusilla and Kit bled.

Over every place where someone he loved died.

When he reaches him, Ash doesn't know what he'll do. Attack him? Yell at him? Kill him?

(Crumble?)

He isn't sure of a thing, really, except that Tessa is crying and pleading fiercely with Kit, and that he can hear Jem and Drusilla speaking urgently, panickedly.

And that Kit is bleeding out, and he can feel it soaking his breeches as he crawls to his side, as he grabs that trembling hand and—

And holds, gently, gently, because his own tremble just as bad. Because he's too spent for rage. Because he doesn't want to hurt. Not Kit. Not Kit.

(He's lost too much to lose Kit.)

Kit looks at him with wide eyes, tears beginning to spill, and tries, wheezing and trembling, to speak. To say what he's broadcasted to the roots of this place, in his desperation.

(I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.)

"Stay alive," Ash says, his voice barely a croak, heavy with tears that won't fall and hollow with loss, with a violent grief.

(Kit's hand twitches in his, bloody palm against bloody palm, cuts against burns. And then his fingers curl around Ash's and tighten.)

Ash digs his stele out with useless hands and burns healing runes on every inch of Kit he can reach, every single one he can remember, until his hands tremble too harshly, until the runes are sloppy and fading and useless, until his sight is too blurry to make out a damn thing.

Until his body finally gives out, shoulder to shoulder with Kit, hands still curled tightly.

He hears voices. Panic. Pleading.

But he focuses only on Kit's breathing, slow and shallow, and his blood dripping.

And he says, heads almost knocking together on the grass—

"This is what I saw."

(Kit's breath hitches, for a moment. A terrifying moment. Ash thinks, for a moment, let me die if he does.)

(And then it evens out into laughter, the worst kind, and Ash thinks, stay, stay.)

(I ran, I walked, I crawled. So stay alive.)

(He can see the back of Janus's golden head. It looks nothing like Kit's. It looks nothing like he remembers.)

(Maybe that's a good thing. But not today. Not today.)

The world swims, crimson and blue, the grass under him gray with ashes.

How fitting. How very fitting.

The last thing Ash sees is Tiberius skidding to a stop at the mouth of the clearing, looking for all the world like the world has crashed down upon his head. The heron necklace dangles from his hand, crushed and charred, the pain of a thousand deaths in his eyes, tears running ceaselessly down his cheeks.

There is no Livia over his shoulder. There is no Livia at all.

(The grass withers under them, the trees groaning and creaking, the whispers dying.)

(There's power in death, maybe.)

(And as the flowers die and the earth sacrifices, Ash hears Kit's breath strengthen.)

The Blackthorn family immediately after the war, a summary:

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Silent City is unusually crowded. Granted, it's perhaps too big to ever be actually crowded, but it's close enough.

People heal, people live, people die. Whatever the outcome, nephilim grieve. There's always someone to grieve. Always.

Some are luckier than others.

Mark and Helen hold a silent and faithful vigil by Aline’s bedside, the witchlight’s faint glow casting shadows over her pale, drawn face. Helen tracks every change frantically, eyelashes ever-shifting and eyes wide. She holds Aline’s hand in both of her own, tracing her marriage rune, whispering pleas that sound more like prayers.

In return, Mark holds her and says, she will come back to you. Just you wait. We always do.

(Ultimately, it’s as good as prophecy.)

Aline recovers swiftly and steadily, color returning to her cheeks and strength gentling back into her limbs. Her wounds begin to close, her bandages less and less bloody with every change, her skin growing warmer. As they wait anxiously, Cristina appears every hour, frowning and wan with concern, carrying news from the rest of the family.

Ty is distraught but iratzes have carried away all physical hurts they can find, although his cries are ceaseless. Dru’s fractures were severe but they are healing well; nevertheless, she waits impatiently for Julian to wake, for Aline to recover, for news about Ash and Kit. Emma is mostly healed, although not even Raziel himself could rouse her from Julian’s bedside, where she whispers all sorts of things to him, waiting hopefully for him to respond.

She even bears news of Tavvy, being cared for by Maryse in Cirenworth, along with the rest of the children. Although afraid for his siblings, he was safe and well, as Magnus could attest to, having dropped in on them as soon as he was able.

(The only person she has nothing to say about, no news and no comfort, is Kieran.)

(He had walked through the portal to the Faerilands after ensuring Aline and Julian made it to the Silent Brothers, with one last, lingering look at both Mark and Cristina, and they had yet to hear anything from him. Then again, he now had an entire country to run—he had his hands full enough.)

(Nevertheless, Mark and Cristina exchange sad, heavy looks. Their longing is strong, a wound that never softens and never scars, pulsing for their attention at all times. Reminding them that they can have Kieran, but only in increments, only in bursts. Nevermind that he’d have them forever and ever if he was able. Nevermind that they never want to leave his side, not for a moment.)

(Nevermind it at all.)

And then there’s the news about Julian.

Unconscious and boneless as tofu, he hung in the balance between life and death, running a fierce fever and breathing in patchy, awful heaves. Mark could see it in Cristina’s eyes, haunted and frightened; the truth of Julian’s precarious state. As she murmured, respecting the unspoken vow of gentle tones that the fear of the room seemed to carry, Mark could see it was taking everything in her to keep herself together, not only for herself, but for them. Because they needed her.

Mark yearned to sweep her into his arms and soothe her, to tell her not to carry their pains and focus on herself, for she was just as tired and just as scared. For she, too, had somebody whose return she hoped for breathlessly.

(But he’d promised Helen, and so he pressed a lingering kiss to her cheek, instead, sweeping her hair back and saying, I love you.)

(What more could he say, when love was his one absolute truth?)

She smiled at them, though, strained lines of exhaustion, and dropped a kiss to Mark’s hair and squeezed a hand to Helen’s wrist gently, promising to return soon.

As she went, Mark thought about Julian, his baby brother who never seemed small, who had gone and grown into something strong and insurmountable and hurt when Mark had been forced to go. And he thought of him on Helen’s back, pale and so very frail, delicate like paper as Mark took him into his arms, limp like a ragdoll.

He yearned to join Julian’s side and hold his hand, brush his hair back and sing him lullabies, even if they were off-key. Anything to give him the comfort he’d had to go without as a child who had grown up too soon.

Anything to soothe him just a bit, as he waited for him to come back, as he always, always did. Julian had never left them, not once, and surely he wouldn’t start now.

(That’d be beyond preposterous, after all, and what were they to do without him? A life without Julian was no life at all for the Blackthorns, Mark knew with utter certainty. A life without Julian would be a hell none of them would be able to endure.)

(If they lost Julian, Mark feared the truth that he knew—they’d all crumble to dust, and nothing would rouse them back up.)

(They had barely recovered from Livvy—if one could even call surviving by the very skin of their teeth recovery—and that’d been with Julian painstakingly pulling them together as he had since their father had died. Without him...)

(Mark banished the thought, and pulled further into his side, pressing a kiss to her temple.)

(Julian would come back to them, just like they would go back to him. They would all come back to each other, come back together. They always did.)

(Always.)

So they wait.

And Mark is right, in the end.

Aline comes awake with fluttering lashes and hazy eyes, hand twitching in Helen’s and already reaching for her clumsily before she’s even opened her mouth around her wife’s name. It’s alright, though, for Helen is just as quick to notice, tears dripping down her dirt-stained cheeks in furious lines as she draws Aline’s hands into her own, holding on like a prayer, like a lifeline.

Her entire body quivers with the force of her gratitude, her relief, love pouring out of her battered form in torrents. Her forehead presses against the lock of their hands, battle-weary knuckles and fingers against porcelain skin, and Mark hears the litany, too low for even nephilim ears, but not too low for him.

Aline must feel it, for her entire face softens, so immediately smudging into gentle adoration that Mark looks away.

He presses a kiss to Helen’s hair and gently detangles himself from her, saying, you’ll be okay.

He waits for her to nod, barely perceptible, and then nods at Aline, who looks at him with steady gratitude and the affection she holds for each and every one of the Blackthorns.

As he goes, he still hears Helen’s words, her quiet sobs.

(Hears her saying thank you, thank you, thank you.)

(You came back to me, you came back to me, thank you.)

In the room where Julian fights to stay with them, Dru pokes another iratze onto the bruised skin of her thigh.

Sat at the foot of his bed, where she can keep track of every move he makes, Dru has her leg spread out before her. It’s not nearly as grotesque as it was back at the clearing, bone poking through swollen flesh in bloody bursts, twisted at awful, odd angles. Quite like Ash’s wings had been as he staggered into the clearing, actually, blood dripping down in thick, ceaseless streams, feathers falling and cartilage scorched in more lines than she could count.

(The thought makes her heart drop to her feet, not for the first time today, tears pricking her eyes. She tries to swallow it all back into place, digging her stele in more harshly.)

(Crying won’t do anything for anyone right now. They need her to keep her cool. She needs to be patient.)

(Ash will probably be okay. He heals fast, faster than any of them, Kieran aside. This is nothing. It’s nothing.)

(The Silent Brothers have performed greater miracles than healing...whatever was wrong with him. They can fix this. They can fix him.)

(They have to.)

The humming from the bed distracts Dru enough for her to lift the stele and go back to playing with it instead of drawing iratzes. Emma.

Emma, who lays curled on her side beside Julian, holding his hand and counting every beat of his pulse, mouthing the numbers one by one. They keep her sane, Dru thinks, like the stele does Dru and the pleas to Helen. It’s something to hold onto.

It’s something.

The hums are gentle, tunes Julian has hummed to her and the rest of their siblings for years when they couldn’t sleep, tunes he must have hummed to Emma, too. Hoarse with tears and pitchy with exhaustion, but soothing, soothing enough that Dru bites her tongue against another wave of tears.

Emma brushes away bits of Julian’s hair, sticking to his bandages and skin with sweat, the move unspeakably tender.

She waits.

They all do.

(The humming and the soft weeping are the only sounds aside from Jules’s shallow pants.)

(Somehow, that makes it much, much worse.)

Ty sits against the side of the bed, a tight little ball of misery, clutching the heron necklace he’d worn on his neck for years in his hands still. It’s ruined, entirely beyond repair, and yet his grip is still careful, cherishing.

(He’d been crying when he walked through the door, Kit’s blood on his shirt and necklace in his hand. He still is every now and again, on and off, and nothing can console him. They’ve tried.)

(But it’s the same grief as when Livvy was gone, desperate and feverish and bone-deep, and so she does what she can, and leaves him be.)

(Not even Raziel himself could make him leave Julian right now, though, so he stays, and they let him, because they're family.)

Now, she does what she can and waits for her body to heal, for her brother to wake up, for Aline to recover, for Ash and Kit to pull through.

She has a life of waiting under her belt. Waiting for her mother to get better, even though she never does. Waiting for her tears to dry up the day she realizes her father won’t ever get up. Waiting for Mark and Helen to come back home. Waiting at home with Tavvy in her arms as her family fought a war.

And now, even though she’s the one fighting wars, even though she was in that clearing when the be-all-end-all battle came, she’s still stuck waiting.

(She’s still helpless.)

(She was helpless under the tree, too, even as she broke her own body trying to get out from under it. She was helpless to watch what Emma couldn’t see, a scream in her throat as she watched her run both Janus and Kit through. She was helpless to watch as Kit bled out, growing hazier and hazier to her, and then to watch as Tessa tried to keep him alive.)

(Haven’t we all lost enough, she thought as Ash fell to his side, limp and still and awfully pale.)

(When Jem got her out of the tree, she had seen the thought reflected in his eyes.)

Footsteps rouse them all, heads snapping up and around, and right there is Cristina, hand in hand with Mark. She’d left to get them something to eat, having returned with fruit and crackers, the most any of them will be able to stomach.

She’s been their pillar, once more, helping Dru move and keeping Ty hydrated with remarkable patience and rubbing soothing circles into Emma’s back. She whispered comforting nothings in Spanish, her voice an anchor, and waited with them, exposing herself to their pain in the hopes of easing it in the slightest bit.

Dru looked at her and saw nothing but family.

She looked at Mark looking at them, eyes taking in everything with pain, mouth thin with it. She watches as he steels himself, a mask of calm as fragile as Julian looks right now smoothing his face, determination hardening along his shoulders.

And then he squeezes Cristina’s hand and does what he has to.

(He coaxes Ty to eat, though how he does it in the end, Dru has no idea. The point is that he does it. It’s not much, more nibbling than anything, but it’s something.)

(He bargains, pleads, and then outright leverages Julian against Emma to get her to sit up and eat. How will she help him, take care of him, protect him, if she can’t keep herself healthy and strong? How will they protect their family?)

(Emma glares balefully, resentment in the line of her mouth and gratitude in the stubborn scrunch of her brows, and snatches her share of the crackers up.)

(Cristina smiles, bright and relieved, and Mark cracks a grin that’s all tremors.)

(They eat in silence, too heavy with fear, with the beginnings of grief, for speech.)

Aline is healing, Mark says, and Dru thinks, at least some of us are, blue eyes and black wings flashing behind her eyes.

(Truthfully, She has no idea if they’ll make it. Last time she saw them, Ash was being carried off by the Silent Brothers, Cortana still in his chest and hand loosening from around Ash's as he, too, was carried away.)

(Ash had looked vulnerable in a way Dru had thought impossible for him, face slack and body raw, crushed by a threat she had been unable to protect him from. She had sworn to herself she’d never let anyone harm her friends and family again, and yet, even after he’d chosen them, had turned against everything he’d ever known for them, she’d been unable to help.)

(Dru bites her tongue and thinks of something else.

(Kit had had color in his cheeks. There had been a certain life to his limbs, as the dead leaves fell over Cortana and stuck to it with the darkening blood. There had been, until they began placing runes on him, clarity in his eyes. More than there had been since he fell to the ground.)

(Dru is pretty sure it was a result of the clearing. Or, rather, what was left of it.)

(In the time it’d taken Jem to get her out from under the tree, right before the Silent Brothers arrived, Kit had done something. What, Dru didn’t know. Maybe she’d be better off asking Kieran. Maybe he’d have an explanation for what she saw.)

(Namely, the way the clearing had died around them.)

(Abruptly and without a warning, the trees had withered around them, the trunks hollowing out and darkening into thin, twisted things, as though a giant had sucked them dry. All the green had fled the grass and the bushes, leaving it gray and ugly, crumbling to ash between her fingertips. The flowers had crumbled to dust under the wind’s gentle blows.)

(And Kit had inhaled, the first real breath since Cortana cut through him, and the whole clearing settled into darkness. Something in it, something she hadn’t noticed was magic, left. Died.)

(And Kit was better for it, looking far more liable to stay alive than he did ten seconds ago, among the empty husks and the ash of what it took.)

(Dru knew that, if it kept Kit alive, she'd burn a dozen clearings down.)

(If it kept Ash and Kit and Julian alive, she’d burn it all down herself.)

(Just please, she thought, staring at Julian, pale like Kit had been as he bled out in front of her, fragile and small as Ash had looked. She was helpless. Please don't take anything else from me.)

Mark wraps an arm around her, firm and reassuring, and looks at her with steady eyes that almost hide the fear and the pain.

We will be alright, he says, with utter certainty. Like Kieran speaks. Simply and softly, though not necessarily kindly.

Mark sounds kind, though. Mark always sounds kind.

And Dru chooses to believe him, because he’s just as afraid as she is, and leans into him.

(Julian wakes up the next morning, embracing all of them with trembling arms, holding them to his chest like he can ensure they never come to any harm ever again that way.)

(His eyes are unsteady, unfocused, but as he squeezes Dru and positively crushes Ty into himself, letting him cry into his neck for as long as he can bear, she thinks, welcome back.)

(As Emma laughs tearily into his back, Mark nuzzling into Julian’s shoulder, Cristina having ran to tell Helen, Dru thinks.)

(She wonders about Kit through her violent relief. Wonders if Tessa is waiting by his bedside, humming like Emma had been; if Jem had sat by him like Mark, staring at Julian like a hawk, refusing sleep until Julian's eyes began to shift behind his lids.)

(If, just maybe, she's another one of the grieving, wailing people who have lost something irreplaceable.)

(Wonders about Ash, knowing he has no one to be by his side, no one to fret over him and hold their breath with every shift he gives, hoping, hoping—)

(He’ll have them. He will. He already has Dru and Kit. They’ll work something out, they always do.)

(All he has to do is survive.)

(Both of them. Survive.)

(She hopes against hope that she doesn't lose them, too.)

(She hopes and hopes and hopes, for Ash and for Kit and for herself.)

(It's all she can do.)

Jem returns Cortana to Emma five hours later, his face drawn with exhaustion and a terror so raw Dru remembers what it feels like in her chest. The terror of losing family.

The terror of uncertainty.

“It’s not your fault,” he assures Emma quietly when she tries to explain, tries to apologize. “Kit is a Herondale. We’d have better luck trying to stop the sun from going down than trying to stop any of them.”

“Will he be okay?” Dru asks into the silence that follows, wanting to wipe the fond melancholy that’s always just on the wrong side of agony on Jem’s face.

Her answer is the way it falls further, even as his eyes blaze. “They are unsure. But Tessa isn’t. She’s absolutely certain he’ll be okay.”

“And you?” Emma asks.

Here, Jem smiles. Not very glad, not very wide, but fierce and knowing, hope so strong it burns. “He’ll survive. We always do.”

Dru believes him.

She has to.

(She asks him about Ash, before he goes. She expects apologetic silence, maybe a promise to find out, because she doubts he’s inquired about it.)

(Instead, something softens in his face, and he says, “They’re keeping him asleep. It’ll help him heal. With time, he’ll recover. Both of them will.”)

(She can’t stop her tears this time, lapping them up with her sleeves, but when he gently squeezes her shoulder in comfort, she can’t bring herself to feel anything but relief.)

(We’ll be okay. We will.)

(We have to be.)

The Carstairs take Ash in during the immediate aftermath of the war.

It's not entirely purposeful, initially.

After the clearing, it takes Ash four days to wake up.

The Silent Brothers keep him knocked out via Sleep runes, in a sort of magical medical coma.

(They tell Jem it's to speed up his recovery. That, as far as they know, it's the simplest way for Ash's body to cope with the damage and mend, given the extent of the abuse it underwent. That it would help his unique physiology kick in, surely, given that he seemed to heal at an accelerated rate; something the iron had impeded. Something Jem does not doubt they will file away for future reference, were Ash to become troublesome.)

(In truth, Jem was a Silent Brother and a nephilim long enough to know that Ash's unconscious state is a lot less about them wanting him to heal swiftly and a lot more about them being wary of him.)

(He can't fault them for that. He himself hardly knows what Ash will do when he wakes up and realizes that he chose their side, when he had no real reason to, and lost it all in one fell swoop in return.)

(Just because it was the right thing to do doesn't mean it didn't cost Ash everything he cared about. That was a big loss to ask a teenager to cope with. Especially one such as Ash.)

(Briefly, Jem entertains telling Alec of the matter, seeing as he's the head of the Clave in its totality now. If anybody can sway the will of the Silent Brothers, it is him, however mildly.)

(He discards the thought just as quickly.)

(Sleep is a mercy for someone who will wake up to his world torn to pieces. Ash will wake up to mourning runes upon white cloth and funerals and ash. He will wake up to loss, heavy and long. He will wake up alone.)

(Better he sleeps for as long as he can, before he inevitably has to face the wounds war has left behind.)

(So Jem asks to be notified when he wakes—I will answer for him, he says, just as he did with Kit—and goes back to his equally unconscious son.)

(Kit's sleep has little to do with runes, and plenty to do with the fact that he'd drained every drop of energy he had left turning the tide of the war time and time again, with little to no rest. Taking out whole fields, going into Faeri time and time again, getting hunted through Idris and chased through way too many places to count them.)

(He'd used his abilities more in the past days than he had in all his years with them. That took a toll. An enormous one, in fact, particularly because Kit had forced himself into some semblance of control and dipped his toes into the true well of his power. He had soon found himself drowning in it.)

(And now here they were, Tessa and Jem, watching over their son as he recovered from the depth of his power. There was color in his cheeks now, blooming fast and steady, and his breathing came easy and smooth.)

(Nevertheless, he was much too still. Nevertheless, he gave no signs of waking. Nevertheless, his healing fluctuated.)

(They didn't know when he'd wake up. If he'd wake up.)

(The things he'd done, how he'd done them—opening Pandora's box without a rope to hold him had cost him. He hung in the balance now, somewhere where they could not help him.)

(But Tessa knew that he'd wake, with a mother's fierce heart, and Jem believed he would see Kit smile again, with a father's ferocious certainty.)

(And so they sat and they waited, watching Kit's veins run pale and bright occasionally, watching as he became something other, even more so than he'd already been.)

(Watching as he accepted it.)

(There was power in his veins, the likes of which nobody matched and the likes of which nobody should have. Kit did not want it. He did not like it.)

(But he would come back to them, even if it meant accepting that he was the last of the First Heir, and he would live only with her power pumping through his heart.)

(Jem thinks back to how the clearing had withered around them, the finality of it, and tells Tessa that Kit has already accepted what he is.)

(Tessa smiles and says, now comes the who, doesn't it?)

The first thing Ash notices upon waking is that he's not in the Faerilands.

In Faeri, the air is crisp and pleasant, carrying with it a sweet scent and a lofty cheer. There's flowers and spice in it, traces of nostalgia in the butterscotch and the roses, the pine needles and the earthy trails no common nose could catch. The power of the land has a scent, the most enticing swirls of color to it, the kind of wondrous curses that thickened in the Unseelie Court.

It's idyllic, almost, though Ash knows better. No thing in Faeri, no matter how lovely, was ever without its thorns. Never without its harm.

(Not even Kit was exempt from that.)

Even so, it's much like the air high up in the clouds; fresh and addictive. It's thin and cold and roiling in his lungs, the illusionary press of freedom, and it's like yin fen to the caged. It's the thing that almost led Ash away astray more than once.

(It's the thing he'd most wanted to show Janus, once upon a time. The thing he had gotten to show Drusilla, watching condensation thicken in her blue-streaked hair and her long lashes as she clung to him, casting trembling shadows over the vivacious wonder in her ocean eyes.)

(The stars had reflected in them, giving new shape to all the constellations Janus had told him about, and for a moment, Ash thought, how beautiful.)

But the air here is damp and heavy, pushing down on him like rocks, a burden as heavy as any crushing his lungs. It gives Ash the impression he might be in a cave, filled with the beginnings of mold and the tepid scent of parchment. He has a moment to wrinkle his nose and try to hide it in the pillow he's laying on, sheets scratchy and stiff, before he catches the ashy smell of ancient bones, so pungent it almost cloaks the faint scent of blood. So domineering that Ash can almost outrun the overpowering tang of iron before it burns through his nose.

And then he gags on it, struck like a knife to the throat.

That wakes him up.

He's up and crouched by the bed in a snap second, hand reaching for a sword that isn't there and touching instead raw, rubbery material where feathers out to be. Which is more alarming still, because his wings aren't supposed to be up there.

Ash hesitantly, slowly touches along the arch of the bones, finding them set and stiff with a material he can't recognize. They're no longer crooked and mangled, no longer oozing and raw, but he can feel how they've been forced into a semblance of their usual, proper shape against their current will, with varied results. He can feel the thick bandages and the places where runes did not suffice.

Memories come back to him in sharp, swift bursts. The pungent scent of iron and burnt flesh. Tiberius and his inclement gaze. Tessa and Jem and their ferocious will. Power strong enough to knock the breath from his lungs. Ash and scorched grass. Blood and gold, Cortana the blade of mercy and—

And Janus, golden gaze hollow and mouth coagulating with red. His entire body pooled in it, really, a body that had been so imposing now drained and small, fragile as porcelain. His fingers, graceful musician's fingers even with all their scars and violence, had curled with longing, so very close to Phaesphoros. All of him had curved with desperation, the very same one that roared within Ash.

All of Janus had curved and stiffened into something other than what he had been, because he was gone.

There's a clatter, steel on steel against rock, against skin, and there's sensation in Ash's ankle, sharp and strange. Tender and yielding, like the bone has somehow softened while he slept. He looks down at it, uncomprehending, and finds more bandages, vigid bruises peeking out from under them.

(Iron. Iratzes never work quite as well as they ought to on him when it's iron.)

There are chains, too. Manacles wrap tightly around both his ankles, loose enough to allow for the breathing of his bandages and yet still uncomfortably close to his skin. They're not iron, that much he knows; he'd know if they were. But they're certainly something, because when he tugs, reflexive and utterly dispassionate, there's resistance that only comes with a power. They're tied around the foot of the bed, pooling on the stone floor in glimmering coils.

(He has a moment to be overcome with bitterness, because he's caged and at someone else's command even amongst the so-called "good guys.")

(It had sounded right on Drusilla's tongue, eyes burning with certainty as she told Ash that he'd become one of the bad guys if he didn't choose to do the right thing for himself at some point.)

(But Ash is still Ash, no matter what he does, no matter where he goes. The Queen's son. A Morgenstern. A weapon. A prisoner.)

(A thing.)

Warmth, thick and strange, pools between his toes and under his soles as the silence blurs into white noise, his surroundings blurring in and out of focus. Try as he might, Ash can't keep himself aware, can't keep himself focused. All he can do is look down at his feet and try to see anything but bloody bodies in a clearing, blond hair and golden eyes and a rune over a quivering, too-slow pulse.

Ash nudges half a step forward, desperate to put distance between himself and the way Kit had said his name like a plea, the way Janus had looked so miserable, and feels vaguely surprised as he realizes there's more than chains by his feet.

There are blades, their blades—his blades, which must have been resting against the bed before Ash jostled them and sent them clattering toward the floor. He's managed to make a mess of them, too, stepping on their sharp edges, blackened steel growing slick and shiny with blood.

That doesn't make much sense. In fact, nothing makes much sense at all.

(He keeps seeing golden eyes, hollow and staring up into the sky with a look of distinct anguish, preserved in eternum in death.)

(He keeps thinking, what have I done. Where have you gone.)

(Don't leave me.)

(Still, it's too late, and he's alone now as he was before Janus came along.)

(He's alone as he always will be.)

He picks the swords up, mechanical and easy, and cradles them to his chest like the most precious of babes. He can feel their edges sinking softly into his sweater, not quite cutting through but just close enough; he can feel the blood seeping through the fabric, warming uncomfortably against his skin.

(He can feel the phantom of Janus's blood under his knees and against his knuckles. It'd been hot against the grass, thick and dark, growing gelatinous with time.)

(How long had he been dead before Ash arrived?)

(Had he suffered?)

(Had he been afraid? Had he screamed and wailed? Begged and pleaded? Fought until the very last second? Remained silent and spiteful to the bitter end?)

(Had he said something before he died? Anything? What had his last words been?)

(Had he thought of Ash when he realized he wouldn't survive? Had he found it in himself to care?)

(Had he found it in himself to want to see him one last time?)

(Fuck.)

Ash sinks into the bed with clumsy steps backwards, the back of his knees clattering against the wooden frame harshly. All his usual grace has deserted him, leaving him with leaden bones and thick, coagulating blood.

He feels heavy as rocks as he collapses onto the thin mattress. The hilts knock together with a sharp, awful sound, his feet sliding harshly against the stone floors, scuffing slick with blood.

Ash has never felt heavier. He's never felt stranger. He's never felt weaker.

He's never felt more helpless or more alone.

His wings are broken and charred and he's grounded, trapped. Chained. His back is burnt and oozing into the bandages tightening around his torso, healing at a rate that was much too slow for one such as him. His ankle is a mess, raised welts and burning indents tightening into skin, bruises darkening the flesh.

Ash's body is one big, heaving wound. It's a rotten mess.

He is a rotten mess, and not a particularly interesting one, either. He's as unsightly as they come, and he can't even bring himself to care, staring down at his blood on the stone floor and trying to blink away Janus's body on it.

It was grass. Grass. Not stone. This wasn't real. Ash's mind was playing tricks on him. Preying on his weakness, on his vulnerability, like everyone had for as long as he'd been alive. It had been grass and it had been greying with ash and blackening with charring and blood. It had looked nothing like stone.

It had looked like the vague memory of his throat getting cut open felt. Hazy and sharp all at once, brutally painful and yet wholly numb. It'd felt like having iron injected straight into his veins, burning him from the inside out in one cool, ruthless go.

His eyes had been so, so empty. The molten gold of them had gone queasy and flat, utterly dull, utterly hollow. They'd never looked so empty. Not even at his worst.

(Ash wonders which of the two he hates most. The way Janus's face had been frozen in misery even in death, or the way his eyes, which had been Ash's sole anchor for so long, had filmed over like the eyes of so many others.)

(He thinks he doesn't want to answer that question.)

(Not ever.)

(But he does know the answer.)

(The answer is both and neither.)

(The answer is that the worst bit had been the utter silence of him.)

(No measured, poignant breaths, a pattern like that of a warrior or a dancer. No heartbeat, over-fast with angel blood and yet still easy somehow, still graceful, even in the face of death.)

(No nothing.)

(Just ugly, empty silence.)

(The same silence there is now, in the City of Bones and its aptly named silent halls.)

(He can't hear anything. Not even his own breaths. Not even his own heartbeat. Nothing beyond the very slow drip of his blood down his skin, beyond the gentlest of hums of Heosphoros against him.)

(Nothing but the roar of his grief.)

When he was finally free of his father's grasp, hand-shaped bruises that went unseen on his pale skin, for they were invisible even to himself, Ash had thought, now I can go back home.

He hadn't stopped to think that home was a concept that'd fall dismally short from what he remembered, what he imagined. Home was an empty house and a piano that went untouched, collecting dust, and jokes that fell rather flat time and time again. Nobody picked those up, either.

Home was the silence of Janus's absence and the silence of his presence, too. The hollow where Sebastian and Thule had taken something with their blood-red fury and their poisonous fog, leaving Janus burst open and only sewn half shut, so that everything that was carried in inevitably slipped out.

Home was the reminder that no matter what Ash did, he could not fix the harm that had already been done. He could love Janus, and be loved by him in turn, fiercely and without a moment's doubt. But he could not fix the broken mirror that reflected them.

(He could not save Janus, just like nobody had saved him.)

When they'd left Thule, Ash had had everything he'd ever needed. He'd had a friend, somebody to love him as he loved them, and a home, and his wings, and he'd had the swords and he'd had hope.

(Hope so bright and so strong it'd left blisters along his skin. They popped with every tiny, silly little disillusion. And then they cracked and bled with every loss.)

(And now they're scarred over, raised bumps all over his flesh, with failure and desolation.)

When he came back to Faeri, he'd had his mother and he'd had Janus and he'd had a home. He'd had someplace, someone, to call his own.

He'd had all he'd ever wanted right in the palm of his hand.

But now he's got nothing and no one. Only broken wings and burnt marks criss-crossing his flesh, cold like Janus's body. Cold like his eyes.

All he's got are two swords that belong to him because of his name and nothing else, and this is it. This is his legacy.

This is all he has left in the world.

(It startles a laugh out of him, a sound like the gurgling of a dying animal.)

(It sounds like Kit choking on his own blood, and that makes Ash choke on his own tongue and a sound that's a bit more like a sob.)

Ash crushes the swords to himself, hardly feeling them as they cut, as they sink deep. He doesn't care.

What has he done? What has he lost for it? He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything. He isn't sure he ever has.

All he knows is that Janus, Ash's some compass, is dead and so is his mother, who had cared for him and who hadn't, but who had still been his mother. His family, whatever crumbling illusion of it there even was, is gone. And they'll never come back.

The Queen is gone and Janus is gone and that the world isn't his, because Ash didn't want it. He never did.

Fuck, he hadn't wanted the world. He'd just wanted Janus. And Janus wanted to give him the world. Janus wanted him to be a conqueror. And so Ash had wanted that, too.

Ash had wanted everything Janus had wanted. Mostly, to stay with him forever.

And now that was never going to happen.

Ash is so focused on the way the swords begin to sink into him, like comfort, on the way he's drowning, that he almost doesn't notice when the door bursts open.

Which is a little alarming, because it's wrenched open, slamming against the stone walls and bouncing off it so harshly that it almost hits the intruder.

Some instinct, ingrained in him with fist and knife, sends his fingers twitching into a grasp around the blades in his hands. His head shoots up, teeth already bared, eyes glowering up at the threat.

Ash feels positively lethal with the sudden and fierce rage that bursts aflame within him, turning his bones to kindle at once. Right now, he could swallow the sun raw and let its fire slide down his tongue and upon the earth.

But as his lips curl back over his sharp teeth, as the fury simmers and builds, dyeing his vision Thule red, like it'd been on the battlefield—there's blue.

Bright, brilliant blue, sky blue, the blue he was denied for so many years that he all but forgot it. Hazy like a head injury and cloudy with pain, so that it almost looks grey, but even so, it washes over Ash until the anger is gone in a cloud of smoke. He feels boneless in its absence.

Not more boneless than Kit, though, who doesn't stand in the doorway so much as he splatters against it.

His knees look rather shaky, clanking together softly, like they can barely hold his weight. His fingers clench around the door, white-knuckled and stiff. He looks awfully pale and awfully drowsy as well, eyes hooded and droopy; it's strange to see his concentration flicker, when his gaze is usually one of single-minded, fierce focus.

(Part of it is faerie in nature. Ash is sure of it. But some of it is just Kit and who he is, plain and simple.)

(Ash feels all the more unbalanced to have that tiny little rug yanked out of him, too.)

"Ash," he breathes, winded and looking sick with relief nonetheless. "There you are."

Ash doesn't say anything. He tries. At least he thinks he does. But something has died and fossilized in his throat, leaving its last breath perched on his tongue light a weight, and the only thing that comes out is a sound that is mortifyingly similar to a whimper.

And then the blood from his hands begins to drip and pool on his lap.

Kit jerks, a full-body thing, his eyes following the current. He looks terribly alarmed, enough that Ash thinks his scent would have gone harsh with char and vitriol, had he been able to smell anything past the remants of iron and the torrents of blood.

(As it is, all his senses are dulled by the fuzziness clinging to his limbs. By the white noise that began shutting the world down when he saw Janus.)

Ash watches as Kit forces himself forth on trembling, halting steps, panting and trembling and sweating like he's running a fever all the while.

There's a bandage around his neck. Ash vaguely remembers the cut, sharp and surprisingly deep and surprisingly straight, but he thinks it should have healed by now. Iratzes. Amissios. Sangliers. There are ways.

But still, the bandage. The bandage and the hand pressing gingerly against his stomach, where there used to be a sword. The hand that's healed, maybe the only part of him that is.

(Kit looks ill. On death's door, really. Like a strong wind could knock him over and keep him down permanently.)

(It doesn't take a genius to figure out the myriad of reasons why that might be. It also doesn't take a genius to figure out he should be in bed, resting.)

(Ash can't help but wonder, what the hell are you doing here?)

"Sorry about the radio silence," Kit mutters into the void, voice breaking with exhaustion in odd spots. "They wouldn't tell me where you were, and they wouldn't let mom and dad tell me either, and I haven't been awake for long."

Ash says nothing. What is there to say? What is there left here?

(There's nothing but grief, Ash thinks. Nothing but the things they had to do and what it cost them.)

Kit doesn't make it across the room so much as he lurches through it. He doesn't crouch down so much as he collapses by Ash's feet, without a care in the world, even as he half sits and half kneels on bloody stones. He winces against what it must do to his wounds, leaning his body against Ash's leg mindlessly, the barrier between them buzzing strangely and unsteadily even as it painstakingly gives.

(Kit's magic must be disturbed. Unsettled. He did, after all, open the door to powers as of yet unexplored. Not to mention the frankly ridiculous amount of near death experiences.)

(And maybe, just maybe, Ash's magic was simmering all over the place, too.)

"It took a while to sneak out without them noticing, and then I had to actually find you," Kit continues, patting around his body for his stele and frowning down at the chains like they’ve wronged him. "That was the easy part. Finding you is always the easy part."

He unearths the stele from a pocket with a pleased sound and begins pawing at the manacles around Ash's feet, drawing shaky runes upon them until they clang open and clatter to the floor. The relief is immediate and intense. Dizzying.

Terrifying.

Kit looks up at him once Ash has been rid of both his chains, smiling wide and crooked, something that blurs into something lazy with exhaustion as his stele clatters out of his hand and rolls to a stop against Ash’s foot. His mouth is pale, lips cracked and chapped, even though his cheeks are blazing, hair sticking to his forehead oddly. His eyes are fully shut now, body beginning to tilt fully into Ash, like he might be falling asleep against him, now that his mission is complete. His breath doesn’t even out, not nearly, labored and shallow with pain, but it does ease some.

He looks a bit like he's gazing up at the sun, open and drained. He looks oddly content.

He looks safe, calm. Trusting.

It makes something inside Ash shatter like a fist around glass.

"Christopher," he croaks, shaky and small, and he thinks that says everything.

(It has to. It has to. Ash has no other words to give.)

And it does. At least Ash thinks so. Because Kit stills, a pointed difference that sinks into Ash’s body, and then slowly blinks blue eyes open, tipping his head into Ash’s thighs like a question.

The haze in Kit’s eyes clears rather abruptly, all the clouds chased away by the awareness that usually permeates them, until there’s only a serious stillness to him. The pain does not leave. Ash isn’t sure it can. But it’s shoved aside in favor of something deep and firm and knowing, something Ash has seen in his eyes a thousand times and then some.

(It’s the same recognition, the same bone-deep awareness, like Ash is both something particularly fascinating and something Kit knows most everything about. It used to be eerie, especially because Ash had the vague impression he looked at Kit in much the same way.)

(Now, though, it’s comforting in a way that’s like a fist around broken bones.)

Kit’s brows furrow, deepening into a frown. Concern, Ash thinks. Concern. One so deep it casts shadows over his face, sinks teeth into his lip and sorrow over the bruises under his eyes.

His eyes sting. His hands shake around the blades, or maybe his body does, because they clink together in awful bursts.

(Ash feels, abruptly, like he’s a child with a knife to his throat again. Like he’s a child getting dragged through a portal and into Thule’s wombs, into Sebastian’s claws. Like he’s a child getting dragged through the mud of the lives of everyone who’s tried to use him.)

(He feels weak and small, and he’s fairly convinced that he is.)

Kit must see it, like he sees so much about Ash, because his face twists into something distinctly mournful. Sad and pained and guilty, though not quite regretful. Just lost. Just drained.

Just helpless.

He blinks rapidly, mouth opening and closing time and time away, face screwing up horribly, until finally all he says is, “I’m sorry.”

Just that. Just that, once or twice or thrice, or maybe so many times Ash looks count.

Kit turns his head into the inside of Ash’s thigh, not to hide but to nudge in comfort, and says, “I’m sorry.”

(He’s kneeling, Ash realizes with a pang. Only halfway, and surely he can’t know what it means, surely—)

(But the next nudge is deliberate.)

(Kit always knows the things about Faerie that nobody else does. And he knows how fae apologize, too.)

Ash makes a sound that isn’t even human. Something so raw and small it sounds animal in its vulnerability. It starts out a sniffle and gets lost in a sob and a whimper, until all he’s got left is his stinging eyes and his aching, tight throat.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Ash whispers, feeling his mouth quiver around the words. He sounds gutted. He feels it, too.

Kit looks devastated, small and broken as he looks up at Ash. Utterly lost. Like he has no clue what to say. Like there aren’t enough words in the universe.

There’s the bandage on his neck. Janus did that. Janus did so much of this.

And Ash let him. And now he’s lost him.

And still, Kit is here.

(What are you doing here, he wants to ask. What are you doing here with me.)

Ash ducks his head, scrunching his eyes shut, hiding away from Kit. The one thing he’s never done.

(There’s a sharp inhale and then a pained breath, Kit stiffening and shifting, pressing a hand against his solar plexus. Where the sword…)

(God.)

There’s silence, then, as Ash tries to ignore the wetness on his face and his hands, drying into something stiff on his lap. As he tries to sink back into the pain, because it’d hurt less.

“I saw Dru on the way here,” Kit says suddenly, quietly. Ash stills.

“She yelled at me for being out of bed, because apparently I look like death, but she guessed I was trying to find you pretty quick. She gave me the info she’d collected on her own, since nobody but Jem told her anything. She asked me to tell you this—thank you.”

Ash’s breath is knocked out of him, like the words are a blow to the lungs. His eyes snap open, falling upon Kit’s. The gaze that greets him is patient. Serene.

Honest.

“She cares about you, Ash,” Kit murmurs. “More than you know. Emma asked about you, too. And Ty. He seemed really worried. I could hear Jem and Tessa talking about you while I slept, too. They’ve been keeping tabs. They’ve been worried.”

“Christopher—”

“They’re all thankful,” Kit cuts in, completely ignoring Ash. “I mean, sure, they’re all wary. But they want to know you. Clary wants to know you.”

“Clary?” Ash whispers, voice quivering with something that can only be hope.

“Clary,” Kit confirms, with a crooked half-smile. “She’s not the only one.”

Ash opens his mouth, trying to gather words, trying to respond. But there’s nothing. He has no idea what to say. He isn’t sure there is anything to say.

(Clary wants to know him. Clary Fairchild, who went against his father, who killed him, who has fought tooth and nail to create the world they have now, wants to know Ash. Even though he’s his father’s son. Even though he was—is—Janus's.)

(She wants to know him.)

There’s a heartbeat. Soft and slow, like a lullaby. Languid and pleasant, soothing, the rhythmic swirling of honey of it gentle like balm. Kit’s heartbeat.

(The white noise has faded, just enough that the world begins to filter back in. Just enough that Ash can hear the way Kit’s breath is stilted, but that it’ll grow steadier.)

Kit is alive. He’s here. He’s here.

He’s here, features softening into something familiar and heart-wrenching, something vulnerable and welcoming. His eyes are warm and fond, open in a way they’ve never gotten the chance to be.

(There’s flecks of amber there. Ash doesn’t remember those being there before. He doesn’t think they were.)

(He doesn’t think the thin ring of gold around Kit’s pupil used to be there, either.)

His hand comes up, wrapping around one of Ash’s, around Phaesphoros’s blade, even as it bites into his fingertips. It isn’t a tug. Just gentle pressure.

“You come home, Ash,” he says, brutally soft, brutally honest. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. You come home.”

Ash holds the swords to his chest, feeling where they nick his arms where his armor is no longer there, and says, sounding hoarse and smaller than he has ever felt: "I have no home."

Kit looks at him steadily, unsurprised and undeterred, like it's never really occurred to him to shy away from Ash and his pain. Like he can't entirely fathom leaving him. And slowly, deliberately, he presses a hand to Ash's wrist, pushing through the pressure with still fingers, their tips falling easily over his Enkeli, over his quick pulse. The hand around Ash’s, around Phaesphoros, clenches and tugs ever so gently. Warm, fresh blood spills over Ash’s knuckles.

But Kit’s face is set, frown deep and defiant, eyes soft and reassuring.

"You have me instead," he says with utter, unflappable certainty, just as Ash once said he is mine.

(Like he believes it, and that makes it somehow alright.)

Ash feels his expression blow right open, into something raw and distinctly painful, something as big as the weight of that realization and as small as Ash feels right now, with the remnants of the world crashing down on him. It’s crushing him down to nothing, grinding him down to dust.

But Kit is looking at this dust, same as Drusilla did when she told him he was more than just a fancy sword and a cursed name, and saying hm, what can we make of this? I think this would make a nice home.

“Christopher,” Ash sobs, the only word he still knows how to say, feeling the wetness finally avalanche down his face, feeling distinctly childish and just a bit okay with that.

Kit nods like he understands, like it makes sense. The gold in his eyes is sunlight on his sky blues. His voice is soft. “Let’s go home, Ash.”

Ash nods, blubbering quietly, and this time, when Kit tugs, Ash lets go.

(The swords clatter down with the awful sound Ash dreads more than anything, the one that makes him seize and tremble and curl in on himself, because it sounds final. He feels scraped raw and bloody with it, empty hand twitching and dripping, making a mess of them both.)

(But Kit just pulls at the place where he squeezes around Ash’s pulse, at the hand where there used to be the weight of the ghost of a legacy, and pulls Ash down. Ash lets him.)

(The pressure between them is thick as ever and maybe harsher, stealing away Ash’s hearing for the moments it takes for it to yield. It settles over them like a heavy quilt when Ash falls into Kit, aggressively warm and familiar, prickling at his skin with it. It feels like waves over his skin, roiling and raging, mournful and comforting.)

(He doesn’t think they’ve ever touched this much. It seems unlikely. It seems unlikely that Ash has ever been held like this, actually, hidden away by all of Kit’s limbs, cradled fiercely. It’s odd in the ways everything about Kit is odd.)

(But it’s not bad.)

(It's not bad at all.)

(Kit must find his stele again, because he scrawls iratzes along the line of Ash’s neck, cuts closing swiftly into tender lines of sensation. Then the stele clatters to the ground again, and the hand that had been holding it settles in the middle of Ash’s back, mindful of the mess of his wings. And Kit sits back and stays.)

(Ash cries into Kit’s collarbone, listening to the slow crawl of his pulse beat through his own bones like a physical ache, and lets himself be held.)

(And he thinks of the Blackthorns asking after him and Clary wanting to know him still and Kit, and figures that maybe he’s got more left than swords and grief.)

(When Jem and Tessa finally find Kit, frazzled and just about ready to start pulling all the tracking runes and magic, they heave a sigh of relief in the doorway. Then exhale in alarm at the blood on the floor and the bedsheets, the chains.)

(And then they see Kit and Ash, sound asleep in front of each other in the bed, and relax. There’s blood crusting on their arms, their clothes. They both look like they need a lot more rest, and about a dozen more iratzes. Ash looks like he’s been crying. He looks completely lost and drained, even in sleep.)

(But they’re asleep and they’re together, and that’s something.)

(They’ll be alright, Tessa says, leaning back into Jem, intertwining their fingers over her waist.)

(The bedroom across from Kit’s would do nicely, Jem says as a form of agreement, kissing her temple.)