Hey there. Just a little quickie I wrote the other day for no reason other than I like Clary/Simon and Simon/Jace. Yup.

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Simon twitched and murmured. His eyelids fluttered like thin butterfly wings, but they didn't open. His hands clenched, unclenched, and he murmured under his breath.

Clary knew she shouldn't be watching her friend sleep. It's creepy. But he wouldn't mind. (He didn't really mind anything anymore.)

And sometimes Simon would get in strange moods. It started to happen after his transformation. His eyes would linger too long on people they shouldn't. (He claimed that he could smell their blood running beneath their skins, the color.)

Once, she knew every line on his hand; once, she could draw the words from the tip of his tongue before he opened his mouth. They would laugh. But now there was a web between them, a web of gossamer that drew them apart.

She hated the way his skin was so ashen. Bloodless. As he shifted in his sleep, she realized that even though he was handsome, the lack of color made him, somehow, thousands of years old. Before the magic, before he had died, he had been Simon with rosy cheeks.

"No- please-" he muttered in his sleep, and she stroked his dark hair. Nightmares again. They came every few nights, bringing restlessness and beads of glittering sweat on his forehead. He bit his lip and she brushed her fingers on his brow.

And then she was struck with the desire to see into his dreams. What was this new pale Simon thinking?

In the white light, she drew a symbol on the vampire's forehead. He shifted as the stele touched his skin, but didn't wake. Her hand was guided by invisible thread, pulled like a marionette into drawing several strokes. The mark, made of swirls and intersecting dashes, glowed on his lifeless face.

Clary pressed her fingers to his skin with a feather-soft touch, and was sucked into a whirlpool of dark sound. She dissolved into the water like sugar, until she had become part of the sky, part of the ground. She was the darkness that held Simon caged. She was a watcher that sat in the corner of the dream.

A figure moved in the edge of her vision. She looked. She saw Simon pressed against a black glass wall by a golden-haired boy. (Wha-?)

Clary stifled a shriek. Her Simon and her Jace, locked in an embrace. This wasn't happening.

Simon entwined his hands in Jace's shirt and pulled him closer (if that was possible). There was a rush of feverish kisses, and short, hot breaths...

"No-" gasped Simon as Jace started to kiss his way down his pale neck, "Please, I need-" His fangs budded from his lips as he spoke.

(Clary stared, only part of the wall.)

With superhuman swiftness, Simon took hold Jace's shirt collar and threw him down to the darkness. A strange hunger glittered in his eyes. The vampire fell onto the other boy and straddled him, then pressed his lips to Jace's neck without biting him.

Clary's lion boyfriend groaned, "Go ahead." Simon pulled his Jace's head back, so that a vein ran color down his neck. The vampire sunk his teeth into the boy's neck. (The vein was rosy red, the other veins, crystal blue. But Simon was dead, dead white.)

"Clary?" A voice was loud in her ear. Jace's voice. But how could that be- Jace was there, on the floor, intertwined with Simon-

Sucked from the darkness, she returned to the living room. A pair of golden eyes stared into her.

"Jace?" she said stupidly, and felt woozy as she spoke.

"Are you alright?" he asked. "You were just staring into space."

She glanced at Simon, still asleep on the couch. His eyelids fluttered, his lips moved gently, and his face was at last free from that tiredness that hung around him.

"I'm fine," she said softly.

Later, when Simon awoke, Clary tried not to look at him. She had seen too much. (Why hadn't she realized?)

"Was I asleep?" he muttered, rubbing his eyes.

"Yes," she said.

"I feel kind of strange," he said as he stood.

"Asprin?" she suggested.

He ran his fingers through his dark hair. "Actually, I feel kind of- really- good. I must have had a nice dream."

"I bet," she said.

The vampire narrowed his eyes and studied her for a moment, opened his mouth, and then closed it again. (She could still see his fangs.) Then he closed his eyes.

"Yes, I can't remember it, but I think it was a good dream-" And then he smiled, smiled with a light on his face that she hadn't seen in months.

And even later, she thought of the look in his eyes again. The hunger.

And then she thought of the color in his face. When he awoke, when he smiled, his cheeks were rosy, so rosy. (Like the Simon she once knew). Someone else's blood ran through his veins. (But how could that be?- It was only a dream-)

And then she, somehow, wished it had been her in the darkness. Not Jace. Her.

She should have been the one to bring Simon's color back.

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Review, will you please? Thanks.