Chapter Text
Izzy walked into her lab and went through the routine on auto-pilot: lab coat on, hair up, hands washed. She'd just laid out everything she needed to draw two blood samples when Jace ambled in, already sliding his jacket off. She'd taken a vial from Alec earlier, then kicked his grumpy self out of the Institute for the night. Between his personal nerves and several long Council meetings, it had been a rough week for him and he'd desperately needed some kind of relaxation, even if he hadn't been ready to admit it.
Jace waited until she'd finished and extracted the needle before he grinned. "Someone's in a good mood."
Izzy smiled and focused on labeling the sample. "That obvious, huh? How's the eidolon bite?"
"The humming is kind of a tell. And it's been two weeks, the bite's still fine. It must not have been as deep as it looked. I mean, you can't even tell it was there."
"Show me."
Jace rolled his eyes, but stripped half out of his shirt and turned around so she could see the back of his left arm. Sure enough, not so much as a scar. Not any scars, for that matter, but she already knew that.
"Good. Simon says hi, by the way. He had a day trip today and he lucked into cell service for a bit."
She labeled the tube and put it away in the fridge next to Alec's. She'd run the samples once she had Clary's, then transfer them to the long term storage with the rest. There were over a year's worth now — she'd been drawing blood weekly from Alec, Jace, and Clary ever since the demon lull. Or, rather, she hadn't stopped after it had broken and had kept on tracking the same levels they'd already isolated, looking for changes. They‘d stayed steady for the most part. Then, a couple of weeks ago, she'd been field dressing an eidolon bite on the back of Jace's left bicep.
The first red flag had been when she'd cut away his shirt to get to the wound and, with half his upper back bared, she'd realized he was missing the scar she'd given him with an errant sword blow when she was fifteen. It had landed perilously close to his spine and gone deep, scaring absolutely everyone except Jace. There was no mark of it now, despite the fact she knew it had been there as recently as three months ago.
The second red flag had been the bite itself. It had been a deep wound that had muddled through tendons and Izzy had argued the Silent Brothers should treat it. Jace had reluctantly agreed, but when they'd removed the rough bandaging the next morning, there was only the iratze Alec had applied and a few faint marks where the bite had been. At that point Izzy had started having questions. Especially once she'd determined Alec was missing his old scars, too.
Shirt and jacket back on, Jace took a seat on the other side of the lab bench. "So how's Simon doing?"
"Good. He's good. He's having fun, learning things. I'll be glad when he's back in New York full time, though." She tried to hold back the automatic smile, but it was no use. She still couldn't help it any time she thought about him.
Jace and Alec were, of course, enjoying it all way too much. Alec had been distracted lately and only tormented her intermittently, but Jace had been picking up the slack and kept giving her dumbass grins whenever he caught her being soppy again. Like now. She rolled her eyes but didn't stop smiling. “So, anyway, about Alec."
Jace shook his head. “Not yet.”
"I know not yet. Once he finally asks Magnus to marry him, total strangers are going to read it right off his face let alone me. I'm talking about the not yet considering he's had the engagement token for a month. If he doesn't think of the 'exactly perfect' way to propose soon, I’m going to resort to blackmail just to put us all out of his misery.”
"You're not living with it randomly popping up in your head, Iz. He's thinking about it a lot. If he takes much longer, I'm going to accidentally propose to Magnus for him and then Alec's going to kill me."
"Wait," Izzy squinted at him, "fully formed thoughts are breaking through now? As in unspoken words? That seems like a significant step up from what you've told me before."
"Uh, well, kind of?" He didn't actually squirm on the stool but it was a near thing. "I mean, yes. Mostly it's just an image of the ring—"
"I'm here!" Clary said as she all but slid into the lab.
"I can see that," Izzy said, starting to set up the second blood draw.
Jace, looking visibly relieved at the interruption, spun sideways on his stool to face her. "If you knew how often she was late to training run roll calls when we were teenagers, you wouldn't have been so worried. Once, Alec literally hauled her out of bed and carried her to the gathering point."
Izzy lifted an eyebrow at the blatant diversion but she'd let it lie, at least for long enough to set the record straight. "You say that as if you had nothing to do with it."
"You were supposed to still be asleep and not notice I was there."
"Oh, I was. I just knew better than to think it was all Alec's idea." She hadn't actually woken up until Alec sat her on her feet at the start of the day's training run. She'd dropped into parade rest on autopilot, then realized what was going on. Jace and Alec had been to either side of her and she'd spent the entire intro speech muttering increasingly explicit threats to their persons. "I might have been barefoot and in pajamas, but I still came in third."
"You were pissed off and mean is what you were. Alec and I beat you because we were afraid you'd catch us."
Izzy hummed happily at the memory of that day. It had been absolute mayhem. Her feet had been torn to shreds by the end but iratzes had been prohibited for the duration and she'd have been damned before giving up the chase. "Ezra was so angry I took him out just two hours in."
"Izzy was 13 and Ezra was three years ahead of her," Jace explained to Clary. "He was also twice her size at that point."
Clary shook her head while rolling up her sleeve. "My field trips were very, very different in high school."
"They were probably boring. Relax your arm." Izzy went through the motions of drawing the blood. "I'd tell you Simon said hi, but I'm pretty sure he talked to you afterward anyway."
"Oh, he did. I got a full rundown of how amazing you are. Again."
Izzy felt the dopey smile spreading across her face again. Damnit. "Okay! Now the question and answer portion." Jace groaned. "So the bond is still getting stronger?" she asked as she put everything away.
He sighed. "Yeah."
"How strong?"
He shrugged. "When we have it opened up, it's fine. It's not breaking or anything. It's just that climbing back out of each other's heads and putting up the walls is taking a lot more effort. It's… bigger? Or it's like everything around it's bigger?"
Izzy leaned a hip against the lab table and spun her hand for him to continue talking.
"It used to be the low level feed I got of Alec's state of mind was this background thing. Like, way in the background. Now it's like it's right over my shoulder. I know where he's at all the time, at least in terms of direction and distance from where I am. And if we're not thinking about it, I'm grabbing for his coffee like it's sitting next to me."
"Plus there's the questions thing and other stuff," Clary said.
"Like fully formed thoughts," Izzy added.
Jace looked up and met her eyes but said nothing.
The first time he'd slipped — or realized he'd slipped anyway — he'd flat out panicked. Thankfully, the next thing he'd done was go running to Alec. She'd been with Alec at the time, puzzling over him doing the same thing, and they'd figured out what was happening quickly enough. Jace had calmed down once they realized it was the bond and that the two of them were channeling each other subconsciously, reacting to the other's environment rather than their own, but he still didn't like talking about it.
She waited him out.
Finally, after almost a full minute, he looked away and muttered, "Answering questions meant for the other one of us has only happened a few times."
She grabbed a pen laying next to her and threw it at him. Jace, of course, caught it rather than duck. "It still happened! It's Alec, Jace, it's not—" She bit off the name Lilith out of habit. Nobody said it around Jace unless they had to, not if they liked him anyway. "This is your parabatai. It's okay. But we need to figure this out and I can't help you unless you tell me what's going on." When you added in both verbally and physically reacting to the wrong environment, it had been more than a few times even that Izzy knew about, but she let him have that one.
Jace took a breath and set his shoulders. "Fine, yeah, answering each other's questions. If we concentrate, then it doesn't happen. We just can't concentrate all the time."
"It's so weird though," Clary said, "it's not like you ever reached for a quiver on your own back in a fight. So why are you suddenly mixing yourselves up on an average day?"
Jace started tapping a rhythm on the tabletop with the pen. "If we're in a fight now then we're not going to do it because we're parabatai. It's like being all one person. Before, the way it used to be— A fight is a dance. Being aware of ourselves, of how we're moving through space, of what our opponents are doing, that's all the point. If we're Jace and Alec on an average day then the bleed over is just… random. Random is confusing."
Izzy shook her head. Jace and his dancing metaphors. She couldn't laugh too much, though, considering he'd been right the first time it'd come up. "But it's better when you're around Clary and Magnus. Is it easier to pull back?"
"Without them it's like being at attention, or standing sentry. With them, it's not pulling us in. We can fall into it when they're around, but it's optional."
"So they're anchoring you."
"Yeah, if Clary's close to me or Magnus is close to Alec — or both — then it's easy to stay inside my own head. I don't even have to think about it."
"Do you feel anything, Clary? Can you sense it at all?"
Clary shrugged. "No, not that I've noticed. It's definitely not anything I'm doing on purpose."
There was the sound of a throat clearing from the doorway and a familiar voice said, "Ahem."
Izzy froze. When the fuck had her mom gotten in from Alicante? Far more importantly, how much had her mom overheard? The last thing she wanted was her mom asking questions before Izzy had some real results, something other than the had-to-be-wrong conclusions she'd gotten with the tests she'd run herself on a whim. They were no better than wild speculation that was going to scare everyone. She wasn’t ready for this. After she heard back from Cat, then she could—
"Weapons?" Jace asked. "Is there an emergency I don't know about?" He was facing the door and smiling brightly as if he hadn't just been caught out.
Izzy turned around and found her mother wearing a sword in a shoulder holster.
Her mom smiled, the momentary softness of her expression a bit vacant with the perpetual exhaustion she carried these days. "Good evening, and no. But I do need to speak to Alec immediately. I tried reaching him by phone, but he wasn't answering."
Jace was already pulling out his own phone. "He's out with Magnus tonight." Then he added, "He's not drugged or behind wards, for the record."
It had been a few months since Alec had been abducted, but everyone was still nervous when it came to his whereabouts.
With the phone still to his ear, Jace said, "He's not answering me either."
Everything considered, Izzy felt safe in assuming Alec was keeping Jace out. Which meant Alec might very well have his hands on Magnus. She squinted at Jace. This seemed like a recipe for disaster.
Jace caught her look and one corner of his mouth twitched up. "They're at— they were going to Pandemonium tonight."
Ah, that's why he was annoyed rather than… anything else.
"How sure are you that he's there?" Maryse asked and Jace paused for half a heartbeat.
Their mom knew something was going on — hell, the whole Institute knew something was going on — but the part where things were spinning out of control was still very much under wraps. Izzy knew perfectly well Jace and Alec were afraid their parabatai bond was collapsing in on itself. They were even more afraid of orders to break it.
Thankfully, Alec wasn't in the room. Angel help him, while he was better than he used to be, he still couldn't hide big things for love or money from their mother. Jace, on the other hand, might be an open book when he was unguarded, but when he dissembled with intent he slid into the lies like a well fitted suit.
"Pretty certain, but if he's not, then I might be able to find him," he hedged.
Maryse nodded. "Good."
"Clary and I'll go get him. Did you want us to meet you back here?"
"We won't need to meet back here, Jace, because I'm going with you." He voice was dry and a bit sardonic. It was the tone that came up when they'd failed to sneak something past her. Damnit. Her mom had definitely overheard something and they were all going to be under her scrutiny until she figured it out. Fortunately, the vast majority of her time was spent on the other side of the Alicante portal these days.
Izzy winced at even having that thought and pictured the look of disappointment Alec would give her if he knew she'd had it.
"Okay," Jace said with a casual shrug, like her chaperoning the errand made no difference to him one way or the other.
Izzy's eyes went wide. Wait, this meant her mom was going to Pandemonium.
Clary hopped off her stool and led the way, drawing Izzy's mom's attention for a few moments of conversation. It was enough that Izzy could grab Jace's sleeve as he walked past her and ask him quietly, "Now you can't get his attention?"
"I… could. In an emergency," Jace whispered back.
Izzy gave him a look that she thought pretty clearly communicated 'This isn't an emergency??'
"Is there a greater demon invading the city as the Inquisitor arrives with a full envoy? No? Then this is not an emergency."
Was Jace blushing? Wait, had the recipe for disaster already happened?? She wracked her brain and came up gold. "Does this have anything to do with last Monday?"
Jace scowled at her. "We are never discussing it. Ever."