Before you read this, I want to apologize for how terrible and short it is. Damn my procrastination.
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It was pouring rain. A boy stood in the middle of the dead street, drenched and freezing cold. He was not shivering, though; he stood very still, taking ragged, uneven breaths. His hair clung to his forehead in blonde ringlets and drops of water sat on his lashes and blurred his vision. The world, in that moment, was a water colored canvas. The colors leaked into each other and stained the building that rose before him, like a polaroid photograph which had been smudged with the fingers of a small child. To the untrained eye, the Sydney institute looked bleak and rundown; but the mundane boy was used to seeing through the glamour. He would never do it perfectly, but he could do it just well enough that he could see the institute as it really was, despite the painful white glare he encountered with every glamour he saw. Though it was evening, the institute was large enough that the white light made it appear almost like afternoon.
Upstairs in the institute, the curtains twitched. A face appeared in the window, looking down at the street with a pair of green eyes. The boy watched her; he had no problem with her knowing of his ability, she was the reason he was there. He wanted her to know. Raising his face to her, he met her eyes, only for a moment. He didn't want to look away, but he knew that he had to; his job was done. He knew now that she would recognize him, if not who he was.
Ignoring the dizziness in his head, he turned and ran.
~
I sat up, yawning. I had been woken from dreams of a strange blonde boy by Stamatina's foot in my face; she was more than comfortable in the chair by my bed, her feet over the arm of the chair and her head resting against the back. She had an open book in her lap and half her hair was in her face, but she looked as beautiful as ever. Quietly, I eased myself out of the bed. I could hear rain tapping on the window, calling me quietly. I had always been drawn to the water. Today was no different. The sound, the smell, even the taste of the water; it was a story waiting to be told. Nathaniel knew I loved to walk in the rain, if i were to disappear now and return hours later, nobody would be surprised. They wouldn't think twice about it, and that made it the perfect cover-up.
I changed quietly into my shadowhunter gear and stashed a multitude of weapons on my body.
Although I kept telling myself they were only dreams, they had been so clear, I had to know. The boy I'd seen last night was real, I knew that much. While I would have liked to blame my recovering illness, that just didn't make sense; I was days away from being cured and I hadn't hallucinated at all since I'd woken. I knew it had to be real. But how? It was a scary thought. I had never seen the boy before, but even in the pouring rain, a story above the street, I recognized him. It was like his presence stirred some long-forgotten memory, perhaps not even a memory of my own. I felt in that moment with amazing certainty that this boy had known my mother.
Last night, after seeing the boy, I went to bed and slept. Sleep had come quickly, and the moment I drifted off, I was thrown into a strangely real dream. It was not my body I was in; it was clearly the body of the boy, but I felt every every raindrop on the bare skin of his arms, the brush of every passer-by as he walked down the street. I could feel the rise and fall of his chest as his feet pounded unevenly on the concrete, the darkness closing in on his mind as waves of dizziness swept over his body. He didn't seem to notice or care, he just kept running. He ran until he reached the part of the street where it thinned again into suburbs, a solid thirty minutes. He made his way into a small gap between two buildings where it was difficult to see him, where he dropped to his knees. The darkness began to close in again, another wave of dizziness washing over him, but he only smiled. He gave way to the darkness and collapsed into unconsciousness.
I could remember the way he had gone, in my dream. It was difficult, but not impossible. That was where I was going. To look for the boy.
