He sat on the floor outside of his room.
His family had passed him by, no doubt, wondering why he was there. When Emma Carstairs, his surrogate big sister, walked by he could tell she wanted to ask him, but the thing was: he didn't know why either. Kit had no idea why he decided to read his book directly in front of Kit's door. The boy had fallen into his home –literally— and Ty had some questions.
Ty wasn't sure if he stood there to guard, or to protect, the institute from Kit, or protect Kit from the institute. He was leaning more towards the latter, but there was still some reluctance to that thought. He wanted — needed — to investigate the boy. Kit had come too soon at such a weird time. They had just found out Malcolm Fade was the guardian. You know the one who had been behind all the recent gruesome deaths, including Emma's parents, which had been blamed on Sebastian Morgenstern.
That hurt Kit, probably more than it hurt his older brother Julian. Julian, who was essentially his surrogate parent, seemed devastated most of the time. Ty guessed it was because he had trusted Malcolm and the downworlder betrayed them. Ty wasn't very trusting and when he did trust someone to an extent it was dear to him. For Malcolm to harm them for something their ancestors did, of which they had no control over, hurt.
Seeing his older brother in such a despair wasn't something that Ty liked to see. Julian had taken care of him and his sisters and Tavvy since the Dark War. What he needed was a break and Ty fully understood that. That was the main reason he was so happy when Mark revealed that he would stay in Los Angeles and not go back to Faerie. Mark had missed out on so much with the remaining Blackthorns when he was exiled by the cruel Clave.
Plus, Mark was the older of the all the siblings, minus Helen who was still trapped on Wrangel Island. Ty thought — assumed — that Mark would take over for Julian. That he would now be the parental figure, or take a bulk of the load that Julian had. Ty knew it wasn't easy for Julian to raise four children, especially a toddler, when he was just a child himself. Jules was 12 when he had taken the role and Mark was over the age of 18, so Ty thought that he would.
He had been wrong.
It wasn't the fact that he was wrong that hurt him the most. It was Mark's reaction. Ty rarely ever opened up to other people, and Mark had been one of the first people he did. They shared a lot of similarities whether it be their bemused perceptions of the world, or their likes and dislikes. When Mark chastised him it immediately tossed Ty right back to square one.
He didn't want to talk to Mark at all anymore. He made sure to steer clear from him at all times, and if that wasn't possible he'd just ignored his existence. He'd ignore him like he had never came back from Faerie at all. It was pretty easy for him, but this was his first day of the strike, so who knows what could happen tomorrow.
Ty looked up when a shadow lingered over him. His hand slowly, but surely lingered over his small seraph blade behind his back. Ty looked up, but he drifted his eyes to the side to avoid looking at whoever it was directly in their eyes.
"What are you still doing here?" His twin sister Livvy asked.
Ty shrugged lifting his book a little.
"Reading," He simply said in one syllable.
"In front of the Herondale's room?" She asked. "Why here of all places?"
If there was one thing that Kit didn't like about his sister it was her persistence. She would keep asking and keep going for whatever she was looking for. Even if it was something that he didn't want. For months, heck years, she wouldn't stop talking about the parabatai rituals. She desperately wanted Ty to be her parabatai.
It made sense. They were twins. They came into the world together and they would most likely leave together. Sibling parabatai's weren't necessarily uncommon, but it wasn't prevalent in the Blackthorn family. However, that wasn't the reason that he didn't want to be her parabatai.
He wasn't sure why he didn't want to be hers. It made sense. They were two sides of the same distorted coin, but she was more livelier, and more normal than him. She wasn't the right one for him, which was something that he knew, but something she didn't quite understand. He had said no a million times, but that didn't stop her from asking every couple of days.
Ty wasn't sure when she would quit it.
He hoped she would soon as it was getting a little too redundant for his minor taste. He didn't think he would ever have a parabatai. He was too different than the rest of the nephilim. And that was something that he was okay with. The concept of having one seemed too mundane to him; he was already willing to, try his best, to fight to the death to defend his family.
Actually, he had temporarily forgotten about his sister's request, as well as Mark's harsh words. When he got enveloped in his books, especially the ones about the various cases of Sherlock Homes, the world seemed to drift away. Well usually it did that. Today it didn't. He was distracted.
While reading he came across the phrase of golden hair and immediately his thoughts when to Kit. Kit's hair wasn't as golden as Jace Herondale's but it was a nice shade. His blue eyes were amazing to look at and that wasn't something that he could normally say. He felt entranced and lost when he first looked into those eyes.
Livvy had been talking to him while he sat there in thought. The book was open but he hadn't been reading. He heard the faint noise of something hitting wood directly behind him. He immediately shot up from the door.
"You okay?" He called past the door.
"What?" Livvy asked confused.
The door opened before either of them could say anything and Ty's voice disappeared. It was gone just like always when he looked into blue eyes of Kit Rook.