A girl and a boy stand alone in the midst of a crowd. They are not lonely, Clary notices, even with the way the people around them sway in and out of their space without noticing them. Alone but not lonely, and caught by the impenetrable rings of people who constrict around them. It is a beautiful, terrible scene - one that Clary itches to capture with charcoals.
The two of them are ethereal without the delicacy that the word implies. They are midnight hair and moonlit scars littered across skin. The girl is clothed all in white but she is the antithesis of innocence; the boy is cloaked in black that doesn't allow him to fade into the shadows. They are dangerous and raw and primal in a way their skin cannot hope to contain, and yet they do not burst from its confines. They are harbingers of death; they are angels who seek to overturn her life simply because she has bothered to notice them.
They defy description, and Clary knows that even charcoals could not hope to capture the atavistic allure that they exude. They are mysterious and beautiful, and even separated from them by the throngs of people in Pandemonium Clary can see that they bear a sort of arrogance that commands attention. It is the kind of arrogance, too, that is not completely undeserved – some of it is rightfully earned and some is the kind of arrogance that accompanies any youthful person who has not yet learned that the sun is hotter than they are, or that the ground is harder than their body, or that there will not always be people to catch them when they fall from heights greater than their own.
Clary can see it in them because she sees it in herself: none of them have realized, yet, that they are not invincible. Like the girl in white, Clary has not yet learned what it is to be afraid of herself; and like the boy in black she has not learned what it is to lose hope.
The three of them have grown up in worlds that coexist alongside each other, in worlds fraught with tension and expectations. They have grown up in different worlds that are the same world; they have been raised by different people that are the same people; and they themselves are simultaneously different and the same, for they are all alone but not lonely in a world full of people; and they are all lost and found by the terrors that lurk in the shadows; and they are all innocent and in love with a world that cannot bring itself to love them back when it has been hurt so many times before.
They are – all three of them – alone and lost and innocent.
But that is where their similarities end, for Clary has never killed someone.