*Runs in flailing madly, glomping you all* MY PEOPLE! I've missed you all so much! I finally found the inspiration to update, i hope you all like it and i apologise for the HUGE gap between my updates, exams went really well (i think) but we'll have to wait and see :) I hope you are all very well and happy and that you enjoy this update :D

Chapter 21

Magnus hadn't slept again that night; his mind was whirring, the cogs spinning too fast for him to follow. So he busied himself with party preparations. He didn't care that his extra attention would mean that this party was going to be ridiculously extravagant. He needed the distraction.

Clary hadn't slept either, despite her intention and deep desire to. Her thoughts were racing at ten thousand miles and hour and they had given her a headache.

The only thing she could think to do in order to distract herself was to draw. So she sat on the window seat, her favourite drawing pad resting against her legs, moonlight playing across the blank page, twirling a pencil between her fingers, idly chewing on her lower lip as she contemplated what to draw.

Nothing around her took her interest. Everything in the institute was so…dull somehow... 'Mundane even.' she thought with a twitch of her lips, 'How ironic.'

She frowned slightly, releasing her lip as she slowly lowered the pencil to the paper, her eyes closing as she began to let her hand guide the implement where it wanted to go. She just let her hand go, her eyes clenched tight as she felt it shift, the familiar scratching sound of graphite against paper providing a comfort for her. A release.

Clary would never admit that she was often fascinated by her art sometimes. But her hand, at times—she could not say it was her mind that conjured these images, because her mind had never been very deep. She had a keen mind, yes, but never a deep mind—created images that needed time and thought to decipher and to appreciate. Clary secretly enjoyed looking at some of her artwork when she had a spare moment, to try and see what she thought the image meant to her. It often meant more than just its surface appeal.

But to fully value it she had to separate herself from her drawings because she could not sit, dissect and appreciate her own work…that seemed to be a little too narcissistic for her taste.

Soon her hand was flying across the paper, depicting graceful curves, harsh lines; all slowly coming together to form something…not beautiful, but…intriguing. Even the parts where all she did was colour in, making those sections deep, dark and bottomless, evoked a sense of something that had been lost to the darkness.

When Clary opened her eyes she was confused by what her hand had drawn.

It had drawn a person. A man. Or boy. She couldn't decide which he was to her eyes because, whilst there was a mix of pure youth and vibrancy in so much of his look, the tousled hair which was ruffled stylishly, very boyish, and his mouth, there was also the overpowering feeling of almost wisdom and the sense of…age in the quirk of his eyebrow and the way he seemed to hold himself up to his full height.

This person's full height made him tall, extremely so. She didn't know how she knew, because there was nothing in the picture that she could compare his height to. She just…knew. She could not, however, see his entire face, for she had drawn him with his back to the onlooker but the fine sliver of his face that was visible, due to his head being angled as if he were looking back over his shoulder at the intruding observer, showed so much.

Light played across the person's back, showing the way his t-shirt clung to him, the outline of his shoulder blades, the dip of his back between them that ran all the way to his waist. It also stretched across that one strip of his face with the slight quirk of his lips that evoked a self-satisfied nature, very smug but not to a point where you wanted to slap the smugness right out of him. As Clary noted, it was a very slight quirk, easily missed, except if you were really looking for it; and for some reason, Clary was. She also noticed the way his arms bent at the elbows, almost defensively as if he was trying to protect himself. His eyes were…unusual. Not particularly alien to her, for she had always had a fascination with cat's eyes for as long as she could remember and drew them constantly. But they were looking up at her with an almost mournful look. He looked as if he was suffering from a deep, emotional pain and Clary almost felt her heart clench in her chest because it was almost as if she could feel the pain coursing through her veins and rushing through every one of her senses.

Her fingers gently ran over the paper, feeling where it had softened as the dark graphite had provided a thick coating and she tilted her head slightly.

The rest of the page was completely blacked out, Clary having blunted the pencil down until it wouldn't write anymore from excessive use. She absently reminded herself to sharpen it later. But the thing she found the most fascinating was the fact that, all around the person there was a thin strip of the paper which was a clear, untouched, unmarked white, almost as if the person was surrounded by the dark, bottomless pit of darkness, but was also completely separate from it, one and the same almost, and was keeping himself separate through that one little bit of light, of clear and optimistically unscathed and innocent substance.

But it didn't seem to look…quite right.

Slowly, Clary moved her fingers from where they were pressed against the darkness and smudged some of the darkness over the pure white gap and over into the inky darkness of his mass of hair. She blinked, watching this person become a part of the darkness slowly as she smudged more and more of the darkness over onto him, disrupting the peaceful stretch of white, leaving only mere gaps where the paleness peeked out from behind the clouds that Clary had smudged across the page.

She pulled her now black-stained fingertips away from the page, biting her lip contemplatively.

The person in her drawing was now hiding behind clouds of darkness and, looking out of the window she slowly rested her forehead against, she realised that he looked just like the moon did that night; a beauty, pure and unadulterated, being hidden by the dark, menacing clouds that tried to smother the light that shines from it.

Trying to veil its true beauty from the rest of the world by shrouding it in shadows.

Ragnor stood in the doorway of Magnus' apartment and just stared, blinking.

"This...is...just...holy crap on a cracker Magnus, what have you done to your apartment?" He exclaimed, dragging a hand down his face, grinning.

Magnus, who had been looking out of a window, his dark t-shirt clinging to him, looked over his shoulder at Ragnor and his mouth quirked up slightly, his hair mussed by sleep, eyes unmistakeably haunted by lack of sleep and the obvious upset that had been hanging over him since the dream.

"Too much?"

Ragnor raised his eyebrows, looking at the 7 disco balls dangling from the cieling, which reflected the colourful beams from the several lights you would most likely see involved in a Broadway production—or a large rock concert—all crammed into the apartment, suddenly making it look much smaller than it actually was. The brick walls had been coated in glitter and were shimmering seductively along with the owner of the apartment who crooked an eyebrow at his companion who had been silent for a long moment.

Ragnor rolled his eyes.

"No, not at all."

Well there ya go :D

I love you all very much and thank you for sticking with me all this time :)

Lots of love from,

Alicia

xxxx