Hazy orange lamplight casts the street in dark shadows, the faces of houses ghastly like rows of carved pumpkins. The concrete underneath his shoes crunch with the shifting of his weight. He turns his head down the other side of the street; the glow of bright eyes fade in and out as dark beasts make their way. His fingers tangle together and he looks the other way – a tunnel of pale orange and white, an inky purple and black above. He shudders away the cold, exhales, then pushes off the bus stop bench.
The feeling of being watched is normal to him now. From block to block, the apprehension grows and snakes up his spine, invades his skin. It sends his synapses into rapid-fire. No one's watching him. He turns to look behind anyway, never breaking pace. No one's watching him. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket. The unnerving quietness abated only by distant, hollow roars, yet his heart beats faster. Paranoia oozes from his forehead. His mouth twitches into a flat line.
Past dilapidation and ivy wrought fences, he comes to an abandoned part of the city. Grass grew tall and through every crack in the sidewalks. Asphalt buckled and heaved, large chunks of the road crumbled and potholes rendered it unusable. He inhales a distinct scent of earth and mildew, immediately regretting it. Suddenly his apprehension disappears, like morning fog off the window.
A four-way intersection. Traffic lights swing in a soulless wind. He plants both feet on the edge of the corner. No more glances circumspect. A deep breath and white puffs of air, he focuses on the converging streets – a spot in the middle where darkness coalesced. It was a tiny, infinitesimal spot, complete and absolute. Into a chasm, he looks. In both a moment, and too many to measure, the darkness looks back.
Death stands before him, underneath the sleeping traffic lights. Its very existence exerts a pressure, like his heart is buried in concrete and his bones are made of snow. No light escapes the immensity of its hood. Into it, the end of the universe - absolute nothing, as if the ageless cloak were the only barrier between it and everything.
Its voice comes to him bold, deeper than an eternal abyss, and softer than a whisper.
"Luca…"
His heart beat wildly, and warmth spread through him. His smile filled the empty space. Luca runs. With love, and it surges powerfully, fueling each foot-stroke toward the end. And in the end, Luca leaps, wraps his arms and legs around the mysterious figure like he'd never see it again.
It just stands there like a mannequin.
"Bryan!"
Bryan throws off his hood and immediately, the spell is broken. He's a normal person with a spectacular grin and cheeks that press against his other's.
"Ok, ok. Down boy. Jeez," Bryan pries Luca off him and sets him down firmly on asphalt crumbs. Luca goes for a kiss, but Bryan reels back, cheeky smirk cast down on him, and shakes his head profusely.
"I still taste like death and darkness."
Luca grabs him by the back of his head, threading his fingers through Bryan's hair, and kisses his cheek instead. It didn't need to be said. With just a look, hazel brown in to clear crystal blues, Bryan knew. It had been four months – and counting. The space between them is their territory, no matter the distance. Luca's just happy to have him close.
"Alright, it's back to the institute I guess…!" Luca clasps his hands together and bops around energetically. Bryan doesn't move to follow because Luca's just dancing around him and hopping up and down.
"People are going to see you and wonder what the hell you're doing." Bryan gives him a lopsided grin.
"Most normal people can't see me at all, so there." Luca fires back instantaneously, and pokes him in the rib. "I am - …"
"If you finish that sentence, I will warp you to Azkaroth and leave you there."
Luca pays him no mind. He tugs the old wool cloak, and Bryan obediently follows. Thankfully, he chooses to bump some beats and sing obnoxiously into the night – a normal sort of weird, rather than the suspicious kind.
The Georgian institute took residence in a forgotten park long over taken by tall weeds and strangling grass. The surrounding neighborhood has seen more glorious days. What few people that inhabited it only sought cover from the elements – their waking hours spent searching for another day. Often, Luca would kill time watching the townsfolk. He'd throw rocks – not at them. Just in their general direction, give them a little scare. Let down his invisibility rune, and walk around in his black jacket – hood up – and giggle when the search around frantically looking for him. He'd take a bite of his apple, because he's an asshole, then leave a bunch he stole from the cafeteria because he's not.
The area is notorious for being haunted.
"Home sweet home!" Luca yells, bowing his head for the venerable guest and throwing his hands out into empty space. Smothered benches, weeded rocky paths, and weathered down gazebos greet him.
"You can't see it, can you?" It's not so much a question as a statement of fact.
Luca holds the pose and waggles his eyebrows.
Bryan flicks him in the forehead as he heads down the cobblestone pathway to the institute. Luca follows unabashedly, though he knows as soon as he walks through those doors…
The institute spire pierces the sky. Rooms in which Shadowhunters worked lit like descended stars, growing brighter they reached the ground. Beautiful hedges and tranquil ponds and grass professionally cut panned out from the base. Around and around, a pathway webbed its way into the surrounding grounds. The difference between the two sceneries is akin to flipping channels – sudden and apparent, like they crossed dimensions to a completely different place. Paradise and hell perpetuate.
The entrance, Luca reaches it first. The rune of the Shadowhunters peers at them, a singular eye etched where the doors met. Luca takes a moment before, softly strokes the chill brass cylinder, grips it tightly in the middle. Bryan palms Luca's hips with a firm grip and nuzzles into his neck. The rune there flares to life with a wild and fiery breath. "Hey. I'm here."
Now, he didn't need to look back.
"You're back!"
Luca groans and tries to make a stealthy escape, but she's on him in an instant.
"Yeah… I'm," and he says this cautiously and drawn in on himself, "back."
She steamrolls over his apprehension. Her focus is lasered, a weapon sharpened to the finest point, and her will is the weight with which she carves out her scrutiny. It was his intention to use Bryan as bait and prance off to the breakroom, or at least the training room – after all, Bryan's the one who finished the all-important, save-the-world mission. Or something along those lines. Yet here he is, getting an earful instead of nuking a burrito and tossing chips. Bryan stands off by the command center cross-armed and glowering in their direction. Luca's not sure when he took off the cloak, or where exactly, but he's glad for it. At least he has something to look at while he's trapped here.
"Tell me, what exactly were you doing in those three weeks, Luca?"
He doesn't immediately answer. Tension in his jaw, but eyes exhausted. Bryan shakes his head ever so slightly, begging.
Shoulders shrugged, he exhales, "I dunno. Robbed a Mundie bank. Jacked off in someone's coffee?"
"This is why you're still playing look-out boy for the Clave. We can't trust you." And on one stilettoed heel, the Administrator turns. But Luca, much to everyone's chagrin, isn't quite the dog everyone thinks he is.
"I'm a damned good look out. At least you can't deny that."
Before the Administrator can retort, Luca brushes past clusters of working Shadowhunters, some of which greet him, some unfriendly in fashion, and he storms up the stairs.
Luca is a damned good scout. That's something he actually takes pride in – and what's wrong with scouting anyway? Keep the institute safe, make sure no Mundanes or Downworlders accidentally stumble upon their spire… How can no one see the importance in that? Even Mundanes appreciate their garbage man. Even Mundanes respect their janitors. Elsewise, the place gets overrun and unbecoming and sure! Anyone could do it. But none were so outfitted as he to take the mantle. He has a specialty that not even the great Bryan Wylfax could match. Something that rivals Clary Fairchild in sophistication. It makes him the perfect janitor, and a janitor is all he wanted to be.
When the Administrator comes to Bryan, she gives him a more frustrated, pleading look.
"I'm not going to make excuses for him."
"Which is why you, I trust. Now. Why are you back so soon? I'd like to hope good news comes of this, but I know we are not that lucky."
"Madame," Bryan's voice isn't nearly as deep as before. Contrary, it holds a clarity and softness that betrays the deep-set scowl he perpetually wears, "I've done everything in my power to stop this. You've got maybe two weeks to prepare. I came back only to warn you."
She sighs away a face contorted in fear. A hand over her face massages away the tension lines as she composes herself.
"Charlie, Silo. Withdraw all Shadowhunters currently on a mission. Immediately." They nod gravely and set to task hastily.
When the Administrator turns back to Bryan, he is already gone.
True to instinct, he finds Luca on the third floor propped against an ancient wooden table and staring blankly at microwave lights. Luca rubs the left side of his neck and lulls his head to the side and sighs impatiently.
"Didn't realize mommy's little failure was back so soon."
The lanky, dead-eyed Shadowhunter flops down onto the couch in the carpeted area, and stretches out. His black combat boots hang limply over the arm.
"Sup to you too, Murph."
Bryan bristles in the confines of darkness. The microwave beeps.
"If you're here, I guess that means Bryan's lurking around or you finally got bored," Murphy speaks mostly to the ceiling, and with an apathetic drawl, "of sneaking around like a cockroach."
"Mmmm. You smell that?" Luca asks with his best Mexican impression, wafting the steamy aroma off his soggy burrito, "that's the scent of cheese and refried beans and oh? What's that? Last two in the whole spire? Guess I should share, huh?"
"You can keep your twice-licked burritos, jackass," Murphy drones as Luca licks the entire length with a wide, flat tongue. He takes a huge bite of the second.
Par for the course. Murphy didn't take easy to most people. Luca, he especially hated. From the first day at the academy to the moment he flipped Luca on his ass for trying to sit on him, Murphy has wanted to paint the walls with the little fucker's intestines. In another universe, Luca believes they could be friends. There are moments where, below the veneer and hostility, Luca sees sincerity peek through.
This is not one of those moments.
Murphy has his angel blade slicing through the thinnest layer of skin. His crooked nose hovers fiercely over Luca's, eyes with all the calm of the dead. The grin Luca wears only serves to infuriate Murphy further. Luca holds his fingers out in mock surrender, lying delicately on the floor.
"What are you waiting for? Behead me."
"Look, you reject. You can loaf around like a useless piece of shit. But do it far from me."
It isn't until he hears Murphy's bootsteps down the hallway that his head thumps against the floor and he huffs.
"It's both… actually."
He wipes the blood off his flawless neck.
It's no hyperbole to say that Raven is the only Shadowhunter in the spire who enjoys her company. Besides Bryan. Neither of whom seem to be here. He can understand Raven's absence. She's off gallivanting the states looking for some do-hickey thingamathing (he wasn't paying attention), trying to save the world from "them darn Downworlders". He really wishes she were here. The beautiful bombshell brainiac. He kind of misses her. It's been… He should really visit more often. And where. The hell. Is Bryan?
"Bryan, where the hell are ya?"
He pats the couch and after a bit of searching, he finds what he was looking for.
"Please don't eat that."
Unfazed by Bryan's sudden appearance on the loveseat arm, Luca scrunches up his nose playfully and flops the burrito around.
"I'm not a Neanderthal, god. Just… cleaning. After myself. Because that's what decent people do."
Something about Luca's voice alarms him. Tenebrous, boyishly rustic, and usually filled with a hopeful naivety, now chuckles in playful despair.
"Get up."
Luca shoots up. Tosses the filthy piece in the trash. Bryan resists the urge to kiss away that distressed, caught-in-the-cookie-jar look. Instead, decides Luca needs this more than what he really wants to give.
"C'mere."
Luca wordlessly obeys.
"What's going on? Talk to me."
Bryan places a comforting, yet firm hand on Luca's shoulder. His right slides up Luca's neck and grips the side of his face. A gentle thumb brushes his cheek. Luca doesn't say anything, but then, Bryan wasn't expecting him to. Luca knows the next command. Not because this is a sacred ritual between two, but because some primal part of him knew it's something he should do. Their gazes connect. All the feelings Luca had been damming, came pouring into Bryan's heart like an icy flood. It required no words. Bryan pulls Luca into him, wraps his arm snugly around. Keeps him there safe and warm. He feels their hearts beat in perfect syncopation, their blood pulsing in unity. The serenity of the moment washes away depression and loneliness, or at least lightens those awful burdens. Bryan smiles, Luca smiles, sheepishly, innocently, and then their foreheads are touching and it's all Luca ever wanted, to be here, to admire those beautiful brown eyes and know that he's here.
"Good, yeah?"
"Yeah. Good."