My Beautiful One

20. I will raise hell

"Amari."

I wrinkled my nose and squeezed my eyes tight shut.

"Amari Silverdown." 

The voice whispering in my ear was mellifluous, with that mix of British English, Irish, and American accent that I have come to recognise as from Idris. It was soft as cats fur, and made me want to wake up even less.

"I really think you should get up. Surely you need to eat..."

If it isn't faerie food, there's no way I'm moving. I thought sluggishly, snuggling back down again in the attempt to fall back into the comforting arms of sleep. That had been the first time in years that I hadn't dreamed a memory, and I never wanted to wake up.

"You can't sleep forever..."

The voice was becoming insistent, and, sighing internally, I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

"You know, technically I can sleep forever." I grumbled.

I heard somebody chuckle, and opened my eyes blearily. The shock of what I saw sent me jumping backwards with a yelp, and I tumbled off the bed in a mess of duvets and pillows. Sebastian was sitting on the bed, and he burst out laughing at the disgruntled look on my face.

How I'd ended up in that bed, I don't know, but how Sebastian had come to be in my bed was the real conundrum.

"What happened?" I asked, more than a little incredulous.

Sebastian raised his eyebrows. "You don't remember?"

"I remember having to tuck you into bed and stay with you until you fell asleep like a little boy, if that's what you mean." I retorted, trying to look haughty though I knew it wouldn't work. I was looking pretty undignified, tangled in a pile of blankets, on the floor, with my hair a mess and my muscles aching from injuries I honestly couldn't be bothered to recall getting.

The Shadowhunter shrugged. The movement was oddly graceful, and his ability to elegantly deflect all insults reminded me uncannily of Jace.

"I asked you to stay, but then woke up about half an hour ago to find that you'd left the chair and were lying on the bed clinging so hard to my arm I thought I'd have to amputate it to get out of bed." He grinned and lifted his left hand so that the metal cuff he had on slid down his arm to reveal a smooth pink scar that looped his wrist. "I've already lost this hand once hand once, you know."

But I was more interested in Sebastian's strange little piece of jewelry, or armour, or whatever that thing was. I had my head cocked to one side as I scrutinised the metal cuff. It was inscribed with Latin: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.

"'If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.'" I translated, looking at Sebastian quizzically. "That's a little..."

"Morbid?" Sebastian suggested. "Dark? Would I be flattering myself too much if I said psychotic?"

"I was going to say ambitious."

"Right." He hopped nimbly off the bed and picked up his weapons belt from where I'd left it on the bedside table. He bustled around for a minute, checking he hadn't lost any weapons, but then he stopped abruptly.

"Do you think I'm a bad person, Amari?" Sebastian asked.

"Yes." I answered without missing a beat, untangling myself from the blankets and standing up so I could lean against the wall. "But I like you anyway."

He blinked at me. "I don't understand."

I shrugged. "I hate you because you're holding me hostage, condescending, probably psychotic, and my moral compass has been telling me to kill you since the moment I met you. But-" I smiled fleetingly at him, "I like you because you are interesting. I've grown up around Shadowhunters, and I've always admired your kind; believed each one of you to be unique. But then you look harder and trace them all back to the same thing: they're born, they serve the Clave, they fight, they die. For whatever reason, though... you're different."

"Different..." Sebastian echoed. "People are always afraid of what's different."

"I'm not scared of you." Defiance was prominent in my tone

The corner of his mouth quirked upwards in the ghost of a smile. "Really?"

"Yes."

Sebastian selected a knife from his weapons belt, and grinned wickedly. He looked like a dark, handsome villain right out of a manga comic: evil, elegant, and oozing cimmerian humour, with his smile gleaming as polished and dangerous as his weapon.

"How about now?"

I assumed an air of boredom, and began examining my nails. "No."

Sebastian twirled the blade around his fingers for a moment before spinning around and throwing the knife. It lodged in the wall, buried right up to the hilt.

"Now?"

"So much for caring about your lovely white walls." I muttered, unhitching myself from the wall and meandering over to Sebastian.

In answer to his question, I grabbed a knife from my dressing table and threw it so that it stuck in the hilt of the knife Sebastian had thrown. In retaliation, he turned his back on the wall that had become our target, and selected another knife before closing his eyes and turning back around again. When that weapon became the third on the horizontal stack of knives, I reluctantly noticed that though I wasn't scared, I was impressed.

Not that I showed it, of course.

"Still not scared?" He sounded almost frustrated, and I replied by shaking my head, smirking and joining my hands behind my back in the way a cheeky child might.

Sebastian crossed his arms. "Prove it."

For a moment I thought of what I could do that would prove it. I knew that whatever I did, it wouldn't matter much to my situation, yet still I thought that it held some kind of power. The key to not seeming inferior to Sebastian was not trying to prove that I was stronger; it was showing that I wasn't afraid even when vulnerable.

So I stepped towards him and hugged him.

No weapons. No armour. Completely vulnerable. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Sebastian to just stab me in the back, and yet I refused to show fear.

But I think Sebastian was incapable of stabbing me at that moment, because he appeared too shocked to do anything at all. He didn't move, didn't even breathe. He just stood, stiff and ridged as a statue: the only sign that he was alive at all was the racing heartbeat I could feel through all our layers of clothing.

"Still not scared." I whispered, feeling his fine hair tickle my cheek as I drew away and stepped backwards. Sebastian still wasn't responding at all, not even looking at me. His dark eyes seemed huge in his pale face, fixed on some point in the distance.

This lack of reaction made me feel a little embarassed, so I turned away to hide my emotions, and began walking towards the door. Fully intending to go to the kitchen and eat some the faerie food I'd brought back from Paris, I reached my hand out to turn the handle on the door, but I was stopped abruptly.

Now it was my turn to freeze, because Sebastian had suddenly broken out of his trance and caught me from behind in an embrace. It was tighter than how I had hugged him, almost roughly so, like he was afraid I'd disappear or try to attack him.

"Amari?" He asked, his voice barely a whisper.

I turned my head to look at him. "Yes?"

"Thank you."