Hello lovely people who clicked despite my not very good summary! Thank you! I'm a long time reader, first time poster, so please be nice. I've wanted to write this for a very long time, so do let me know what you think, I want to learn! If your thinking to yourself 'hmm not too much drama, not too much adventure, not too much in the way of sexy times-my filters must be set wrong', then never fear! New chapter coming very soon! I am not one to bury the lead, once we've all gotten through this prologue together I anticipate each chapter to be a queer utopia where everyone is busy having all sorts of adventures, angsty feelings and romantic interludes. If that sounds like your bowl of spaghetti- please read on!

-Prologue-

When Alec, Jace and Isabelle ran through New York, the city became their own. They were fast, fast, deadly and invisible, the way they liked it. Too fast, for Jace to think about how lonely he was. Too deadly for anyone to suggest Isabelle should retire to the kitchen. And invisible enough that no one would guess Alec's secret. They dodged cars, scaled walls, and leaped between buildings without hesitation. Somehow, for the three of them, it was only when suspended mid-air, between the roof of one building, and their target; the less-than-sturdy façade of the building opposite, that they felt really safe. Sometimes, between missions they would laugh, almost manically, as if even they struggled to process the elation they felt, such a sharp contrast to the oppressive order and tradition of the Clave, that dominated most of their lives.

Alec especially loved missions on warm nights, when all the Mundanes were out and enjoying themselves. More than the others, he suspected, he drank in his surroundings. His father had taught him to constantly observe, it was a crucial skill for any Shadowhunter (except, apparently, his siblings, who had more of a point and shoot mentality), and in a City like New York it also offered something else. Running down Christopher Street, or, increasingly, any street, he would see them; pairs of men, pairs of women, holding hands, kissing, looking at each other with the kind of love in their eyes Alec knew that he craved. He would see them coming and it would take all his energy not to shout; 'me too!' as he whooshed past, an invisible witness to their love. He was sure that one day he would slip up, the Shadowhunter illusion would buckle from sheer force of will and a gay couple kissing outside a bar would be alarmed to find that they are sharing their moment with a demon-blood soaked boy holding a bow and arrow, studying their every movement.

It was an unseasonably warm night when he first saw the boy with the feet. He and his siblings were scaling the Brooklyn Bridge to investigate reports of Downworlders who were forcing the bridge to shake in order to freak out unsuspecting Mundanes. He heard him, before he saw him,

'If I knew that quitting school to fight the forces of darkness was going to involve chasing Peeves to the ends of the earth, I'd have stayed in History of Magic,' the voice said. Alec quickly finished hoisting himself up under one the bridge only to see six dangling feet vanish with a crack, from one of the beams above. They left no trace of who they were, or of the Downworlder who had been spooking pedestrians.

When the three reported back, Alec gave an impassioned plea that the mystery was worthy of a new mission, to track down all six of the dangling feet and interrogate them about the disturbance on the bridge. That they could be a threat, somehow. But, no one seemed concerned about the incident; if Downworlders wanted to clean up their own Accord breakers, especially Accord breakers who seemed mostly interested in giving Mundanes a slightly weird day, rather than putting them in any kind of real danger, then more power to them. But Alec couldn't put the voice out of his head, it was like, it didn't make sense in his world. Sure, he had seen Warlocks disappear through portals before, but never just 'crack' into thin air. And sure, he knew that Downworlders had as much respect for national borders as you'd expect from anyone whose existence presupposed the straddling of two different dimensions and whose eternal life upset any philosophical nature of permanence, let alone the nation-state, but there was something about the boy's British accent that wasn't just foreign, it was otherworldly. And speaking of his voice, nothing he said quite added up. Sure, the things Alec witnessed everyday were ostensibly magical, but he just never heard them called 'magic', let alone thought of it as something that was taught in a school. What, did they have lessons about how to ride broomsticks and brew curses in bubbling cauldrons, too? And what, what by the Angel, was a Peeves?

Alec left the Institute for fresh air, with the admittedly optimistic hope of clearing his head. He was equal parts vexed and excited by those feet. Vexed because he knew these infatuations had to stop, because that was what it was, an infatuation. Despite what he had insisted to Hodge at the meeting, he wasn't remotely concerned about the warlocks and the Peeves disrupting New York's uneasy peace, he was infatuated, infatuated with a voice and a pair of feet. Alec sighed, that, surely was a new low. Yet, as his own feet pounded a familiar route, he allowed himself to entertain the part of him that was excited. Perhaps, just perhaps, those feet represented an opportunity. They were no Mundane feet, that much was obvious, but increasingly Alec was sure whatever they were, they were not Downworlder in the strictest sense of the word. Maybe they were just different enough to jolt him out of his misery. Maybe they represented entry into a kind of parallel world, where people learnt magic in a school, and could disappear in mid-air, where, and now Alec's imagination really ran away with him, people of the same gender loved each other, without fear of persecution.

Alec reprimanded his imagination as soon as he realised where he had allowed it to wander. It was silly, he had no reason to suppose that the three pairs of feet he had seen represented anything but a slightly eccentric group of warlocks. Even if they were from some kind of bizaro world, what evidence did he have to suggest that they were any more forgiving of difference then his own? It wasn't just silly, it was dangerous, if Alec was going to spend his life hiding his sexuality from the world, these flights of fancy would only cause him pain.

He found himself at Christopher Street, where he knew he would, he was outside Stonewall, but did not dare go in. He watched two women walk out, laughing uproariously, one, a taller woman with broad shoulders was dragging the other by the hand. They stopped to share a kiss, it was a sensual kiss, but Alec got the feeling they had only just met, they trod on each other's feet, and their noses bumped, they weren't used to being close like that. Alec thought about his first kiss, it had been on more or less that exact spot, only it had been twice as awkward and half as sensual, he had cried, it had been the first moment he knew for sure he was gay. He had left the men confused, and probably hurt, outside the bar doors and ran, ran and cried until he couldn't breathe, then fixed his face, returned home, and went back to work like nothing had happened. Alec was broken from his reverie as the smaller women screamed with delight, Broad Shoulders had clearly decided she couldn't wait for her any longer and had lifted the smaller woman up into a fireman carry and was running away with her, back to her apartment or a hotel Alec assumed, feeling equal parts happy for them and jealous of them. He listened to the sound of their laughter fading away. Soon it was indistinguishable from the drone of cars, the pounding of music, and the wail of sirens; the nature sounds of New York City.

Alec had an idea he'd follow a wail, nine times out of ten police were speeding towards the wreckage of a Downworlder they could never hope to apprehend, even if they'd been able to see them. But he was suddenly distracted by flashes of red and green lights;

'Stupefy', he heard, followed by other words he couldn't make out, then a 'crack', followed by a voice saying

'Damn, are you okay?'. He stopped. He knew that crack, he knew that voice. He turned the corner and saw three people, around his age. There was a gangly red headed boy who was staring at a bushy-haired girl that was nursing a superficial wound on her face, and, there, closest to him, he was.

'Y-ou, you're the boy w- w- w-', Alec stuttered. They all looked up at him, surprised by a new comer, but strangely unperturbed by his shock and awe. The boy flattened his fringe compulsively and gave Alec a resigned look as if whatever Alec was about to say, he'd heard it a million times.

'You're the boy with the feet', Alec burst out. They all stared.