Fire to Water

Ink and blood

Kit knew it was rather petty of him, but when no clues deigned to turn up the next day, or even the day after, he was beginning to get rather annoyed. At Tessa, mostly, for sending him somewhere he would her to actually not only be in the general vicinity of, but also have to actually interact with Ty, who really was unfairly beautiful, even when he was hanging upside down off of Clary's bed and paging through her sketchbooks which his headphones lopsided on his head and his hair like an ink spill on the floor and is careful clever fingers running back and forth over the wire spiral of the notebook and his shirt riding up a little on his stomach and his cheeks flushed like rose petals from being upside down and—

Kit tore his eyes away from Ty and back to the wardrobe drawer he was supposed to be studying for clues.

"Kit," Ty said.

Kit felt his heart almost stop in his chest. "Yeah? What's up?"

"Come here and look at this."

And oh no, Ty wasn't moving so he clearly was expecting him to come and sit on the bed next to him, and that was way closer to Ty than he was prepared to be (Ty had probably noticed that he was always conveniently across the room but Kit was way too panicked to care except he really did care, actually, and it had been a really long time and oh no, Ty was looking at him).

Kit was somehow on the bed before he realized, and then he's leaning over next to Ty and his face was so red but Ty didn't notice.

Ty was looking at that weird picture of Jace, and really, it couldn't be Jace. It wasn't...

There was something missing. It was somewhere in the tilt of the head, in the stiffness of the joints. It was something that had been Jace, once, maybe, and was no longer.

If it wasn't Clary, Kit would have said it was just an abandoned sketch.

If it wasn't Clary, and she wasn't missing, Kit wouldn't have thought of it at all.

But it was so empty, and so lost. Somehow it reminded him of how Ty had looked, right after Livvy had died.

"It looks like writing, doesn't it?" Ty asked, tilting the page so the sunlight from the window hit the pencil marks.

Kit tilted his head, ignoring the strands of Ty's hair that crept into his face and tilted the sketchbook so he could see it better. Ty's hand was just above his, and his finger slipped down to cover Kit's in two points of contact that burned like embers in Kit's mind.

"You're the Centurion," Kit said, and then realized how childish that sounded. "I don't know. I guess? I don't know what language it could be in."

Ty looked over at him, and wow, okay, they were very close together, so close Kit could count his individual eyelashes, which were usually just a long black sweep of shadow (not that he was going to count his eyelashes, because that was weird and kind of creepy). His eyes were bright and steel-grey, and they glittered with the clever delight of mysteries, and his cheeks were slightly flushed from being upside down.

"But it's something," he said, and he was smiling, and he was so close that Kit could see the individual flecks of lavender in his eyes, and somehow they had fallen closer together on the bed so that they were pressed together all along their sides, and their fingers were still touching, and how was this even happening—

Kit opened his mouth to say something and the door flew open with a bang.

Kit tumbled off the bed in surprise.

"I have food, finally!" Dru said. "Kit, what are you doing?"

Kit picked himself up with as much dignity as he could muster and silently thanked Dru for managing to enter when she did, or he would probably have said something wildly embarrassing to Ty that he would vastly regret as soon as it was out of his mouth, and really, that was why he had gone to England in the first place, to avoid this.

"Dru, look at this, we found something!"

The bags of food were abandoned by the door, and Dru crowded over next to Ty, who was sitting up on the bed, not draped over the edge anymore. Kit awkwardly edged up behind them, taking care to not go through Livvy, who had drifted over from where she was half-in and half-out of the desk.

"Are those supposed to be runes?" Dru asked. Ty beamed.

"Pretty weird runes," Kit said. "Kind of crawly. Like spiders." They were terrifying and wrong and also familiar, like the inversion of a favorite memory, like Ty's hands, dried blood flaking off of them, tangled in his hair after they dragged him away from Libby's corpse.

Livvy made something that was not a sound but almost the absence of one, an inversion of a gasp, something inherently wrong. It made the hairs on Kit's arms stand up. It was the noise of her death played backward, that same little oh, but inside out somehow, and not a sound in that it didn't go through his ears and would never have been made by anything he had ever heard of.

Livvy thrust herself away from the bed.

"They look demonic."

"I don't know the language, though," Ty said. His brows wrinkled, and he scowled elegantly at it.

Kit cleared his throat and fetched the bags of Chinese food, which they ate on the bed.

"At least," Dru said, and carefully moved the sketchbook away from the food, "we have a lead now."

There was that.

"Elementary, my dear Watson," Kit mumbled under his breath, and Ty laughed. 

A/n: I haven't read qoaad in a while and my appropriation of canon writing style is deteriorating, but I'm not sure how to fix that because I have no time and like seven hobbies sooooo. 

I'd say it's going to get better but tbh it won't.