The title comes from Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes: "You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?"

First, Alec stays strong for Isabelle. He carries her to the infirmary and holds her hand as iratzes are written on her skin. She's only half conscious, and of course she doesn't remember what happened while she was possessed, but she knows that the demon was inside her, and she knows that it took a knife to the back to stop her.

"Alec, tell me what happened," she begs, but her face is too pale and Alec can't get the feeling of her too-still body under his hands out of his mind.

"It's okay," he soothes her, "you didn't hurt anyone." He wishes that the same thing could be said of his possession.

"Did I try to hurt you?" she asks, desperation in her eyes.

"It wasn't you," Alec replies, taking her hand in his and rubbing circles into the back of it. "I love you, Iz. It wasn't you."

Isabelle drifts off not too long after that. Alec holds her hand for a long time. He uses his left hand, of course. His right lies still in his lap. He keeps thinking he sees blood on it, even though he knows the blood has been washed off for a long time now.

With Isabelle asleep and healing, Alec crosses the infirmary to Jace. Now he has to stay strong for him. Jace's shirt is bloody and ragged and his eyes are just distant enough that Alec knows that whatever happened to him in the City of Bones was horrible. He doesn't need to touch their parabatai bond to know that Jace has been shaken to the core.

"Tell me what happened," Alec says quietly, sitting next to Jace on the bed.

"Nothing." Jace doesn't look up. "Nothing that matters. What happened here was much-"

"Tell me what happened," Alec repeats, and it's all the encouragement Jace needs to tentatively begin. Alec coaxes the story out of him one sentence at a time, and every sentence makes him want to kill Valentine more and more.

He can't bring himself to grieve over Hodge's death too much, and then he immediately hates himself for it.

One of the healers finally shoos Alec away from Jace's bed and sketches a Sleeping rune on Jace's arm. Judging by how quickly Jace succumbs to it, it's clear he really needed the rest.

And then Alec is at a loose end, so he goes to his room and closes the door. He bites down hard on his left hand - he still can't bring himself to use his right - and screams.

He knows how demon possession works. He knows that the demon had control over his body, suppressing him entirely. He knows that he has no memories of the possession - it's not that he can't access the memories, it's that they don't exist. He knows that what the demon used his body to do isn't his fault.

He also knows that the demon only targeted Jocelyn because Alec couldn't bring himself to stop hating her for shooting at Jace. He also knows that it was his right hand that buried itself into Jocelyn's chest. He also knows that her blood was literally on his hands and that he keeps thinking it's still there.

He bites down on his hand and screams again. The taste of blood fills his mouth and he yanks his hand out in horror, staring down at it. It wasn't his left hand that crushed Jocelyn's heart, it wasn't his left hand that was covered in blood, the blood is gone-

The blood on his hand is his own, from where his teeth broke through the skin. Alec takes a long, shaky breath. It's his blood, not Jocelyn's. It's his blood, not Jocelyn's. It's not Jocelyn's blood.

Someone knocks on the door and Alec has a seraph blade in his hand before he's even aware that he's moving. "Alec?" a voice calls through the door. Alec recognizes it as Jean, another Shadowhunter. "Aldertree wants to see you."

"Tell him I'll be there in a minute," Alec calls back, his voice thankfully steady. He can hear footsteps walking away from the door. He takes another breath and puts away the seraph blade.

The bite marks on his hand are obvious. Alec pulls out his stele and holds it over his inner wrist. For a moment, he just lets it burn into his skin, then he moves it in the swooping lines of an iratze. The burns and the bite marks disappear.

There's still blood on his hand, though, so Alec goes into the bathroom to wash it off. He scrubs at his hands until they're red and raw, the skin just on the edge of cracking. Then he looks at himself in the mirror and sees blood on his teeth, so he brushes them so hard his gums bleed, making more bloodstains in his mouth. The water he spits into the sink is tinged with red.

Alec looks at it for a moment, then he sits down on the cold tile floor and puts his head between his knees until he can breathe without feeling like he's going to throw up.

By the time he stands up, he knows it's been much longer than the minute he'd said it would take to see Aldertree. He hurries out of his room. Now that he has something to do, he can control himself better. He wrestles his emotions down and puts on a blank mask. He doesn't trust Aldertree enough to let him see any vulnerabilities.

"Ah, Alexander," Aldertree says as he opens up the door to his office. "Please, come in. This shouldn't take too long." He ushers Alec over to the couch and closes the door. The expression on his face is full of sympathy, and Alec doesn't have the energy to decipher whether it's real or not.

"I want to express my condolences over Isabelle's injury," Aldertree tells Alec, leaning against his desk. "Is she going to be alright?"

"The healers said she should be fine," Alec replies.

Aldertree nods. "Unfortunately, Miss Branwell is not doing as well. She's being moved to Idris as we speak to be treated there. Everyone hopes she'll make a full recovery as well."

Alec hopes desperately that she does. He shot Raj to get him off her, but his fingers had already started to bore holes into Lydia's chest (just like Alec's hand had done in Jocelyn's-). The arrow to Raj's thigh had been enough to send the demon running. Alec wishes someone had been there to shoot him when he was possessed. Jocelyn hadn't had a weapon on her, but if she had, Alec would have preferred that she plunge it into his heart rather than allow him to push his fist into her chest and-

"Alec?" Aldertree asks, leaning forward. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," Alec replies shortly.

The way Aldertree's lips thin makes it clear that he doesn't believe him. "After everything that just happened, no one would blame you if you required some time to rest," he offers tactfully.

Time to rest would be the worst thing possible for Alec. He needs something to do to keep himself from shattering into pieces. "I'm fine," he repeats.

Aldertree eyes Alec for a long moment, then finally nods in a way that Alec knows means he's only agreeing to prevent an argument. "I was hoping you could tell me the details of the demon's death. Clary is… indisposed at the moment, and you were the only other witness who would remember the ordeal."

"Indisposed" is a horribly distant way of saying "grieving." Alec grips his right forearm tightly. It's his fault Clary is grieving, his fault she has a reason to grieve, his fault Jocelyn is dead…

"The demon possessed Isabelle," Alec says in a wooden voice. "She went after me. She was about to kill me when Clary stabbed her with the seraph blade. The demon left Izzy's body and Clary managed to kill it with her blade before it got away."

"Hmm." Aldertree frowns. "Did Jace tell you what happened in the City of Bones?"

"He did."

"Did he tell you what Valentine set up the entire demon attack as a distraction so he could break Jace out?"

Alec swallows hard. Jace hadn't mentioned that. "We were interrupted before he could finish his story. A healer came over to treat him."

"A shame." Aldertree sits next to Alec on the couch. "Our losses were hard, but we mustn't let them stop us from fighting. Valentine now has the Cup and the Sword. He must be stopped and the Mortal Instruments must be reclaimed."

"I know," Alec replies. "Valentine has to be stopped at all costs."

"I'm glad to know you feel that way," Aldertree replies. "I agree." He puts a hand on Alec's knee. Alec flinches away from the contact. He's still gripping his right forearm, now so tightly that his nails are digging into the skin.

"You should get some rest," Aldertree says gently. "Trust me, I wish I could."

"I'm-"

"I don't mean taking time off," Aldertree adds soothingly. "Just for tonight. You're off-duty anyway. You should sleep."

The mere idea of sleeping is unthinkable. Alec knows he doesn't have the memories of the possession, knows that the memories don't even exist in his brain, but he still thinks that perhaps he remembers shoving Jocelyn up against the wall. He knows it's probably a memory he created after watching the security footage with Clary, but it feels real. He knows that, if he sleeps, his mind will fabricate the rest of the memory and torture him with it.

Sleeping is obviously out of the question.

Aldertree claps Alec on the shoulder and Alec jumps about a foot in the air. "Get some rest," Aldertree tells him again. "We have busy days ahead of us."

Alec leaves Aldertree's office and goes to the infirmary. He takes an unnecessarily long route to get there, but it doesn't go past Jocelyn's room, the room where the demon wearing Alec's skin killed her. It's impractical to take a longer route just to avoid it, and Alec won't be able to do it all the time, but for now, he doesn't think he can go past that hallway and still keep it together.

When he gets to the infirmary, Jace and Isabelle are both still sleeping. No one bothers Alec as he goes over to Isabelle and brushes her hair out of her face, then goes to Jace and lays a featherlight hand on his shoulder. "They should both make a full recovery," a healer named May tells Alec gently.

"Thank the Angel," Alec whispers.

"Were you injured?" May asks.

Alec shakes his head. "I'm fine." Physically, at least, he is. There's nothing the healers can do to help him.

May doesn't look like she entirely believes him, but she only puts a gentle hand on Alec's back. "I'm sorry about everything that happened."

"So am I," Alec replies. He takes a step away from May. "Tell me if anything happens."

"Of course we will," May agrees. "Go get some rest, Alec."

Alec doesn't know how people expect him to be able to rest, but he leaves the infirmary and starts heading back to his room. For a moment, he considers going to Magnus' apartment, but he dismisses the thought almost as quickly as it comes. He can't leave the Institute while both Isabelle and Jace are injured. And he's not sure if he can just show up unexpected at Magnus' house, especially like this. No, he needs to stay at the Institute, as little as he wants to.

Alec goes to his room and looks at his bed for a long moment. He can draw a Sleeping rune on himself, but that only guarantees sleep. It does nothing against nightmares. He can draw a Quietude rune so any nightmares won't wake anyone but himself, but they'll still torment him, he's sure of that.

He can also just not sleep, which is seeming more and more ideal by the second.

Alec sketches a Wakefulness rune on his upper arm and feels all of his exhaustion fade away. It's not as good as sleep, and Alec will only be able to get along with the rune for so long, but at least it won't give him nightmares. He'll manage.

But there's only so long Alec can stay in his room before he goes mad. He paces back and forth, and he flips through half of the books on his bookshelf, but nothing distracts him enough. He still keeps thinking about waking up in the hallway with a blood-covered hand, about seeing Jocelyn's murdered body, about watching the security footage where he plunged his hand into her chest. It wasn't me, he tells himself, but it was his hand. He might not have been in charge, but it was his body that threw Jocelyn against the wall and murdered her.

Alec lurches to his feet and staggers to the bathroom, kneeling in front of the toilet. The nausea roils in his stomach, but nothing comes up. After a long moment, he takes a deep breath and stands. He goes to the sink and splashes water on his face. He avoids looking at himself in the mirror.

And then he goes to the training room, because he needs to do something or he'll go crazy.

The Institute is gearing down for the night, but the training room is always open. Alec beats the punching bag until the knuckles on his right hand split. Then he looks down at the blood on his hand and goes to the bathroom and vomits. He washes his hands until all traces of blood are gone. When he goes back out, he wraps his knuckles, both to hide the blood and to prevent any more.

He spends the whole night in the training room. When other Shadowhunters start to wake up, he goes to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and a quick breakfast. By the time he's eaten, the Institute has come alive again. Alec avoids everyone, gets his bow, and goes to the roof.

He spends the whole day up there. He spends some of the time shooting his bow, but not all of it. He paces. He falls asleep for nearly an hour before he wakes up choking on his own screams. He considers going back into the Institute to check on Isabelle and Jace, but there's no guarantee that he won't run into Clary and he can't face her. He stays out on the roof.

When night falls, he pulls out his bow and begins to shoot. The repetitive motion is the closest to comforting he can get. He shoots again and again and again-

"Alec."

And then, suddenly, he's not quite so alone. He turns, arrow ready and drawn. Jace is staring at him with naked concern in his eyes.

Alec hates it.

"Move."