a struck link // christopher lightwood {3}

fifteen // our reflections (dense and lucid)

Gloria woke and for a brief, delirious moment, she didn't know where she was. Slowly, the pieces of the night before started to coalesce: dozing off in a chair at Rosamund's party, Seanan finding her and striking up a conversation about Nadia Abdullah and the runed ushabti discoveries outside Amarna and downhill from there. Escaping into the night like schoolgirls cutting class, off to hear ragtime and drink too much and inevitably stumble home to Berkeley Square and go to bed, if in separate rooms. Thanks to that Gloria was pretty sure, whatever kind of relationship they'd developed in the whirlwind of the night before, it wasn't a romantic one. At least not yet.

Thankfully, she'd remembered on her own and didn't need it, but her past self of the night before had been just barely sober enough to leave a note to that effect, so she didn't panic and think someone had taken her home, whether she wanted them to or not, reminding her that she'd undressed herself and hadn't slept with anybody and was here of her own accord. She tossed the note absently into the fire and started the process of getting dressed for the day. Someone, Seanan or herself she wasn't sure, had laid out her crutches neatly on the trunk at the foot of the bed. Once dressed, Gloria retrieved them, slotted her arms into them, and hauled herself to her feet. It always hurt a little to walk like this, her hip twinged with the pain of motion, but it was better than walking on her own, a process so painful she saved it for absolute emergencies and going to the toilet only. And walking with the crutches was something she needed to do. If she relied wholly on the wheel-chair, her legs might atrophy and then the chair would become more a prison than a choice.

Seanan was already at breakfast when Gloria arrived, dressed in a grey wool skirt and a dark green shaker-knit cardigan, her hair in a loose braid flipped over her shoulder and tied with black velvet at its ends. It hit Gloria then just how many redheads the London Enclave actually had: Charles and Henry, Cordelia's dark blood auburn, Seanan with her vivid orange braids, Brigitte, though she wasn't a Shadowhunter, and even Pluto, though xyr red wasn't natural and was more of a coppery pink than anything. She could count at least three people as well who wore glasses. They seem to congregate, a ridiculous part of her suggested, don't they?

"I don't know what you eat for breakfast," Seanan said, looking up from the book laid out in front of her, "if you eat breakfast at all, so I hope you're alright with chicken noodle soup, then."

"For breakfast?"

"Feeling a little under the weather," Seanan responded. "Probably allergies. Being in London might help but it doesn't take all of my woes away."

"You truly do love this city, don't you?" Gloria asked, sitting down.

"You might not believe it, but I was born here."

"Oh, really?"

"We went back to Scotland quickly after, but I was born in this house, on the kitchen table."

Gloria blinked dubiously at the rose-colored linen tablecloth.

"Not the dining table," Seanan said. "The kitchen table." She pointed. "In there."

"Oh, thank goodness." Gloria rubbed at her forehead. "I was not fond of the idea of eating at a table someone gave birth on." She peered at Seanan's side of the table. "What've you got there?"

"The book? It's an account by..." Seanan flipped to the title page. "Don't know how to pronounce that, actually, but he's one of the first Shadowhunters to Ascend from outside Northwest Europe—a young man from Portugal, incidentally."

"My homeland." Gloria rolled her eyes. "Well, Pai's, but he gave it up practically, after the War." She leaned back in her chair. "We live almost solely in São Luis now. The country house isn't falling apart, we're not letting it turn into Chiswick, but it's covered in dust cloths and we don't really go there. I think it pains Pai too much—reminds him of the life he had before he truly knew who and what he was."