Disclaimer: Cassandra Clare owns the beauty and amazing-ness of The Mortal Instruments Series.
This pairing is insane, but I really love this story, and how it worked out. Hmmm. So enjoy its insanity. This is the final battle in CoG, where Jace is fighting Sebastian, and Isabelle shows up in her amazing kickass way, and there's an epic battle. Isabelle POV, and major City of Glass spoilers, obviously. Isabelle/Sebastian. Please read and review:)
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When she looked at his severed hand, laying there on the ground between them, she didn't know whether to smile or cry.
A hand. A hand can be nothing, sometimes. Unimportant, really, in comparison to everything else, like a heart, a soul… other things the handsome boy before her was lacking. But a hand. A hand could brush back your hair so gently that you felt breathless, a hand could crash a hammer over your head, a hand could kill a small child. A hand could brandish a gold whip, a hand could help you find revenge.
And apparently, a hand could hesitate in doing so.
She didn't want to hesitate. She wanted to kill him. Didn't she want to kill him? Hadn't he killed her? Her, and Max alike, slaughtered in entirely different ways, by the same beautiful and terrible boy in front of her. The boy with wicked, shadowed eyes.
There was something there, in the shadows of his eyes. A wall. Maybe that was why she was drawn to him. She was curious. She needed to know what he had to hide.
She thought she'd see beyond that wall now, now that she knew. Now that she knew who he was and what he'd done, and the monster he truly was.
But she couldn't. There was somehow… more. Something greater that he hid behind a wall, something so deep and complex, she couldn't ever know it, and she wondered if he even knew it. Did he know his own secrets?
He wasn't charming now. He wasn't winsome, and his words weren't sugar to her ears, and he didn't pretend to subtly care about her, and that should have made him less desirable, but somehow it didn't. He was compelling, a gravity she couldn't understand.
But how could he be gravity, if he'd done this?
And Jace was bleeding, and his eyes were nearly closed, and the boy before her was gaping at his missing hand, and she raised the whip without thinking, because thinking would stop her, weigh her down and whisper not to hurt the lovely boy before her, and the golden cord crashed down on him, the fighter in her stronger than the lover in her. This was what she was born for. Killing monsters.
And he was gone, and she was drawing the iratze on Jace, thinking of his problems, and pushing hers from her mind, and then suddenly she was flying, but it hurt, and there was some kind of cracking noise inside of her – was that her ribs or her heart? – and she darted for her whip, but he'd caught it.
She should have been more upset that her own whip had betrayed her, the gold cord flailing against her skin, but somehow she felt more pain for the fact that it was him, him hurting her, him betraying her, him killing her.
And she – she who never flinched at blood, she who had fought greater demons, she who had endured almost every kind of pain, and never even cried – she screamed.
And he was cursing at her, and the whip was crashing down, and somehow it felt so wrong for it to end like this. His sword was pointed at her heart, but she had no breath to laugh at such irony.
And she was falling, and she could barely hear his words, his curses, maybe because the present couldn't stay on her retina, maybe because she didn't want to, but the blackness was coming, coming quickly, and her mind was ridden with images.
They were like frozen snapshots. Black and white, memories, moments from now and then and infinity, and she couldn't understand them, but they were there.
Jace, his golden hair floating in the river, eyes closed, blood spilling into the water, twisting into patterns like the fading Marks on his skin…
Her mother, holding Max's body, not crying, just empty, like there was nothing left in her, as if she'd become entirely hollow…
Clary, holding Jace's letter, face pale and drawn, hands shaking, falling to pieces, as she stood in the kitchen, frozen by his final words of love and goodbye…
Alec's face, as he saw them gathered around a corpse. The shock, the pain, the absolute idea of an ending. Down the rabbit hole, into blackness and infinity…
Max. Max reading anime. Max curled up asleep, small, naïve, innocent. Max's small shoes beside her tall boots in the hallway. Max eating. Max smiling. Max running. Max crying. Max telling her there was someone climbing the glass towers…
But the last thing she saw, as she felt the sword on her chest, ready to cut her heart out, was a pair of shadowed eyes, and in them, a wall. And as she drifted into the blackness, not comprehending the sound of quiet footsteps and crunching bone and trickling blood and the thump of a body hitting the ground, she let herself believe that somehow, behind that wall was regret.