title: a drug for fallen angels
fandom: the mortal instruments
characters: alec lightwood (+ et al.)
information: AU | multichapter | inspired by kevin zegers' arc on gossip girl as damien dalgaard
summary: the one where alec lightwood is a drug-dealing shadowhunter

02. after my blood turns into alcohol

Obnoxious mundane music was blasting from the penthouse suite, drinks of multicolor were flowing in oddly shaped glasses, and people were buzzing about as if they had no care in the world. The whole affair was raucous and reckless, the crowd pulsating and thundering into the late hours of night.

Isabelle had dragged Simon into the crowd, urging him to stray as far away from the selection of drinks as possible, even though he was no longer a mundane. Jace and Clary were probably making out in the corner of the room for all to see, not that extreme face-sucking was an uncommon sight at a Downworlder party.

Alec stowed himself away at a table in the far corner of the room and preoccupied himself by tracing patterns on the floor. He had gone relatively unnoticed for the first hour, keeping to himself as the party got bigger and the screams got louder.

Footsteps approached him after a while, drawing his attention from the floor. A teenager, no older than sixteen, took the empty stool beside Alec. Years of lessons and reading instinctively told him his customer was a werewolf, one much older than he appeared.

"Enjoying the party?" the werewolf inquired nonchalantly.

Alec gave a noncommittal shrug and reached down his coat pocket for a small packet of silver powder. He discreetly pulled it out, but at a party as riotous as this, there wouldn't be anyone fixated on Shadowhunters sitting in a corner by themselves.

"I heard you have the best out of everyone here tonight." The werewolf removed a few loose bills from his pocket and placed it under his drink. He slid his drink toward Alec, who picked it up with mild interest.

Alec pretended to bring the drink up to lips and swiped the money into his free hand. With his other hand, Alec removed the yin fen and slid it toward to werewolf under the table. The werewolf nodded and slipped away into the crowd, leaving Alec by himself in the dim light of the party.

/

Over the course of the night, Alec made several more transactions until his stock had nearly run out. Yin fen was freely circulating around the party by now, but Jace and Isabelle had enough mind to stay away from anything that was offered to them, even though anything they acquired for themselves would be fair game.

Vampires, fae, and werewolves stumbled about as if in a trance, brought on by the high of the yin fen. They danced and they partied, delirious and held firmly under the influence of demon powder. A few had caught on the Shadowhunter in the corner was responsible for the quality stuff, but most dismissed it as mere rumors and proceeded to obtain their powder from their ifrit dealers in the center of the room.

Alec attempted to keep a low cover, switching tables after a few customers and going as far as marking some of the packets with a mandelin. The glamour would be weak, yet it would suffice to keep his exchanges low key as those without yin fen were prowling the penthouse for dealers.

Several times, Alec noticed vampires slipping a bit of yin fen into the unsuspecting drinks of werewolves and vice versa. Opting to stay out of any conflicts that would arise, he moved away from the area and sold to the next. The werewolves, however, seemed to be getting the greatest kick from the silver powder. Their eyes were ablaze with fire, stimulating their every sense and providing them with a torrent of power and stamina.

If anyone was to overdose and die, the party would promptly end much to the disappointment of all the attendees. Those with free access to the substance made sure to regulate how much of it was consumed; nothing spoiled a proper Downworlder carouse like death.

/

Sometime past midnight, Jace drunkenly stumbled around the room in search of his parabatai, Clary in tow. Alec's last customer, a rather pretty nymph with waistlength hair, had just left his table. Jace slipped into the seat previously occupied by the nymph, and Clary sat next to him, resting her head on his shoulder.

"Did you drink something tonight? Are you suddenly exploring the wonders that is the opposite gender?" Jace slurred, his ability to snark not deterred by his inebriation. Alec did not deign himself to respond to an intoxicated Jace and decided that even if he did not answer him, Jace wouldn't notice since he was currently lost in Clary's red hair.

"Your eyes are like a pot of gold. I want to climb rainbows to get to you, because Jace, you are a pot of gold." Clary wrapped her arms possessively around Jace. Alec, who had succumbed to thirst and sought out what he believed was an untainted glass of water, almost choked.

Jace seemed to have not heard Clary compare him to a pot of gold because he ran his fingers through her hair and turned to Alec. "This is a great party. This is a Magnus-level party. This may even surpass a Magnus-level party." Jace paused for a moment and looked around, suddenly thoughtful. "Wait, where is Magnus?" he whispered lowly, as if it was a great secret and he held the key to the universe.

"He's trying to sort out what he claims to be a misunderstanding with the Argentinean authorities. He doesn't want to be banned from half of South America." Alec responded. According to Magnus' most recent text, he would be home tomorrow night at the earliest, even if his appeal wasn't likely to succeed. There was a mention of Peru coming back to haunt him in the most unfavorable of situations.

Jace nodded, eyes filled with wonder. Clary let out a high pitched giggle and took another sip of her drink. "Jace, Jace, do you see the rainbow? Will you be the pot of gold at the end of my rainbow?" She pushed back her hair, pulling it up into a bun and releasing it. "I think I'm too close to the sun, careful, we're too close to the sun. We're going to burn Jace, I feel like we are going to burn." Alec, apparently the only one not drunk at the table, forced down his laughter.

"It is so hot. I feel like I am burning. Jace, why is there fire? I—" Clary paused "I am the girl on fire," Clary finished, very proud of herself.

Jace sloppily kissed her forehead, then quickly backed away when he felt the heat. His face sobered slightly and he put his hand against her forehead. "Alec, she really is burning."

Clary played with a lock of her red hair, fascinated by the color. "There is fire on my head, look, look, there is fire on my head. Will it burn into my brain?" Her eyes widened with fear, suddenly realizing something. "My head is on fire, help me, Jace." She seized his hand and clutched it, waving her head around to extinguish the imaginary fire.

Alec laughed at Clary's antics, but stopped the moment his fingers touched her head. Jace was right, Clary's head was burning hot. A mundane would assume she had a high fever, but she was running a temperature comparable to what you would need to bake a cake.

Clary reached for the rest of her drink, and noticing the color of the drink, Alec snatched it from her hands and threw its contents onto an unsuspecting selkie. The liquid was a transparent milky white, an appearance similar to milk diluted with water.

Clary screamed out in frustration and wacked her hair in Alec's face, whose mouth caught strands of her red hair. "My drink!" she cried and tried to reach across the table and wrench the glass from Alec's grace. "I hope your face burns because this fire hurts."

She let out a low wail. A group of vampires turned in her direction, amused by the half insane Shadowhunter. Jace turned to look at them, and the second he did, most of them suddenly found the floor as interesting as Alec had earlier in the night.

Alec examined that last few drops of the drink that remained in the glass. Noting a tiny fleck of silver that didn't quite dissolve on the rim of the glass, he turned to Jace. "There's yin fen in this." Conscious of the potential repercussions if Clary had been drinking from liquids mixed with silver powder the entire night, he told Jace they had to leave immediately.

Jace stared at him skeptically. "Yin fen? Don't Downworlders get high off of that stuff? I would know to stay away."

"Clary wouldn't." Alec pointed over to Clary, who's eyes were squinted in concentration and hands attempting to pull out long chunks of hair. "We have to leave and treat her. Do you know where Isabelle and Simon are?"

Jace had nearly completely sobered up after realizing his girlfriend might have imbibed dangerous levels of a drug. "They left."

Alec's eyes flared, a reaction brought on by years of brotherly instinct. "What do you mean they left?" he demanded.

Jace shrugged. "I may or may not have told them to get a room earlier tonight."

"I always say the same thing to you, but that doesn't mean you ever listen."

Jace held up his hands placatingly. "They're probably at the Institute, and you can probably guess where. We won't find out until we get back."Jace propped a still hysterical Clary against his shoulder. She had fallen silent for the most part, now whimpering and muttering incoherently about a fire that would devour her. Alec helped support the other side of her, and the three of them made their way through the crowd and to the door.

The thundering music, the hazy smoke, and the yin fen induced insanity slowly receded from their senses as they got further away from the penthouse, but was sharpened every time a deathly pale Clary made so much as a noise. They stumbled occasionally, since Jace was still heavily intoxicated—the rune of equilibrium did not seem to apply when one was drunk—yet lucid enough to narrowly avoid getting run over by an oncoming taxi cab.

/

The three of them stumbled through the front door and heaved Clary onto the bed in her room at the Institute. Jace was frantic with worry, if not groggy from the amount of alcohol he drank. Isabelle and Simon emerged from Isabelle's room looking considerably disheveled after hearing the loud noise that was Clary banging her head against the headboard. Jace took her head into his lap and stroked her hair; she muttered on about her rainbow going up in flames.

"She might have overdosed on yin fen, which is fatal. Clary's showing a textbook case of overdose, with her hallucinations, the paleness of her skin, and the burning sensation she is feeling," Alec said, recalling what he had red in books and stories his customers had detailed during certain exchanges. "It's slowly killing her," he finished softly, acknowledging the reality of what no one in the room wanted to believe.

"It's a good thing you read textbooks all the time. I was thinking all that time alone was going to a waste," said Jace dryly, carefully etching iratzes and healing runes onto Clary's skin. A few seconds after every application, the black rune dissolved into her skin, leaving Clary breathing heavily and thrashing widely in Jace's grasp.

"The runes aren't working," Isabelle said and set her stele aside. "Hodge never covered what we're supposed to do when we overdose on demon drugs."

"Don't any of you have a copy of The Shadowhunter's Guide to Not Dying When Runes Don't Work or something?" exclaimed Simon, clutching Clary's burning hand. Alec's heart skipped a beat and his face paled, even if it was highly unlikely Simon knew about his copy of the book and the drugs inside. The probability of that was nearly equal to the probability that Clary would magically heal and start tap dancing on the roof with an umbrella.

Jace's eyes lit up for a moment. "In fact, I think Alec has a copy of that."

Alec hesitated and slowly answered with, "It might be in the downstairs library, but I don't think drug overdoses are covered in it."

Isabelle jumped off Clary's bed. "It's worth a try. I'll look for it downstairs and see if I can come up with anything else."

"What other options do we have? Your parents are still in Idris and Clary's parents are off gallivanting the world on their honeymoon," stated Simon.

"Do the Silent Brothers treat teenagers who have overdosed on yin fen, or is it not covered in their training?" said Jace humorlessly.

"We need a skilled warlock to heal her. Yin fen is cultivated in some warlock dens, sometimes by ifrits. That's her best chance," Alec spoke from his chair in the corner of her room.

"What about Magnus?" Simon piped up, his eyes hopeful.

"Magnus is currently in Argentina sorting out something he refuses to tell me about," Alec replied, slightly irritated their solution to every problem they encountered was to bother his boyfriend for assistance.

Jace opened his mouth, probably to say something along the lines of if Alec needed Magnus back in New York for something urgent, he would portal back in less than an hour regardless of what he was or wasn't wearing.

"Don't Shadowhunters have a phonebook of warlocks to use at their disposal?" Simon asked, saving Jace from an annoyed look or five.

"As a matter of fact, we do," said Isabelle. She leaned against the doorframe, bearing an armful of worn leather books of varying sizes. Isabelle threw them at her feet and plucked out the largest volume, bound in red with golden lettering on the cover.

(author's note)
chapter three is in the works; things only go downhill from here.
it's been well over a year or two since my last read of the series, so thank you to the TMI wikis of the internet.