My Beautiful One

16. Fight for you

By the time I reached the third week in the apartment, I was getting restless. The last time I'd done... anything, really, had been that trio of days I'd tried to escape and given Magnus my letter. I hadn't heard from Magnus, but I tried to withhold my opinion on that.

What confused me was the fact that I also hadn't seen much of Sebastian. Well I'd seen him, but he had hardly spoken to me, and didn't eat with me anymore. You would think that after his 'I want you to be mine' outburst, he'd be around every corner, lurking and smirking and plotting. But he seemed to have drawn inside himself, not showing that expression of deep pain, or even that fake grinning facade. He just hovered in expression-purgatory, his face and voice devoid of emotion.

And... I missed him.

I still hated the boy with a passion for what he'd done to my life, and I was scared of that little slice of psycho I'd seen as he'd pinned me to the floor. But I was bored, and Sebastian just so happened to be the most interesting person I'd ever met.

Maybe you're developing Stockholm syndrome. I mused as I pulled on the days usual too-small clothes. The mystery owner of the clothes hadn't turned up, but that trail had gone cold almost as soon as I considered it. Whether Sebastian had held another girl hostage before me or not, I had at least deduced that she was quite a bit smaller than me, and I mean Clary small. But whoever she was, she wasn't here, and I could only hope that she'd got away.

That or he killed her.

I stopped in the act of pulling on a pair of yoga pants, slightly hesitant as I considered wearing the clothes of a murdered girl. But then I just shrugged and carried on.

Maybe I'll just ask him about it. I thought nonchalantly. Not that I wanted to ask him directly, of course. To be honest, I was just wanted to talk.

So I pulled on a black t-shirt, gathered my hair up into a ponytail, and made my way up down the corridor with the intention of finding Sebastian. First, I went to the top of the staircase and peered down into the adjoining rooms of the kitchen and the living room, but he wasn't there. Then I back-tracked and searched the other corridor; the one which had two locked doors, the 'neat room' (as I dubbed the room I'd found the Herondale dagger in), and Sebastian's room. I would never have gone in there, but after putting my ear to the door, it was obvious that he wasn't inside, so I kept moving.

I knew that there was one more room in the house, and it was the only room I hadn't been in yet. In my various explorations of the house, I'd always come close to going up to the last room in the house, but I'd always turned away at the last moment because of the fact that it was up a spiral staircase.

I guess I'd been expecting some kind of Jane Eyre-esque crazy girl locked in the attic, but in the end, my determination to find Sebastian won out, and I bounded up the staircase and turned the handle on the door. I was surprised to find it unlocked, and, encouraged by this, I stepped into the room and surveyed my surroundings.

Of course he keeps weapons somewhere. I realised almost smugly as I registered the fact that I had finally found the weapons room. Every kind of weapon was there: swords, axes, bows, quivers, arrows, throwing stars, nun-chucks, staffs, kindjals, and the most gorgeous selection of knives all had their own attachments to the wall, where they hung there like the most masochistic but beautiful wallpaper in existence.

And in the middle of it all, was Sebastian, and it suddenly felt like the world had stood still.

His back was to me, even though I knew he'd heard me enter, and that caught my attention more than anything else in the room. He was shirtless, his pale back was exposed to me, showing the silver scars of faded runes and the striking black of permanent marks. But every Shadowhunter had that.