A/N: Hi! This is the first in a new series of oneshots. If you've read my collection titled Fragments, this is very similar, but it's focused on the characters missing and reminiscing about Clary during the year where she lost her memories. This one is a flashback set sometime during Season 1. If I absolutely had to pinpoint it in time, I'd say shortly before 1x07.
oolong tea and midnight conversations
The halls of the Institute were nearly silent as Alec skulked towards the kitchen. At nearly three a.m, it was too close to sunrise for any demon attacks to be imminent, and there had been minimal incidents with Downworlders needing Shadowhunter intervention. Alec knew from experience that there would be a few people in the ops centre monitoring things, but everyone who actually lived in the Institute would be asleep. He, Jace, Clary and Izzy had gotten back from a hunt an hour and a half ago. They'd had more than enough time for everyone to shuck their gear, shower, and head to bed. The only reason Alec was still awake was because he needed tea. After a hunt, the only way to calm the adrenaline flooding his veins was a good cup of oolong. Black, no sugar.
After what happened tonight, he might need two cups. The hunt had very nearly ended in Clary getting decapitated. She'd mishandled a scenario that most Shadowhunters learned how to navigate in childhood, and Jace almost got himself killed saving her. Alec swears, Clary Fray is going to give him an aneurysm. She should never have been let out in the field.
As Alec made his move towards the kitchen, he stopped. He could hear something. A thudding. He took two steps back, peeking his head into the training room. A solitary figure was there in the dim lighting, moving swiftly. Thwack went the bo staff against the training dummy. Whoosh went the figure as it dodged an imaginary attack. Thud went the person as they fell to the ground, losing their balance. As they stood, Alec saw a flash of red hair, a build that was too small to be anyone else.
Clary.
Alec let the shadow of the doorway hide him as he watched her hit the dummy with the bo staff again, aim a roundhouse kick to its torso. Next, she went for the punching bag, aiming hit after hit after hit until even he could see the blood on her knuckles. She dropped her fists to her sides, her breath uneven, expression pained.
Stop now, Alec thought. Stop before you do to you what I do to me.
He watched as she raised her fists again. A frustrated cry escaped her lungs as skin met fabric.
"Stop," he heard himself say. Before he knew what he was doing, he was in front of her, taking her wrists in his hands before she could continue. "Clary, stop."
She looked up at him. Sweat coated her face, wisps of hair falling out of her ponytail. "I'm fine."
"No, you're not. Look at your hands."
She glanced down at her knuckles, at the blood streaking them. She blew out a puff of air. "It's nothing an iratze can't fix. Why do you care, anyway?"
He didn't know. He didn't know why he cared. He never had before. She'd been with them for weeks now and this was the first time he'd even touched her.
"Do you want some tea?" he asked.
They walked to the kitchen in silence. Alec filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove. He felt Clary's eyes on him as he got two mugs from the cupboard and dropped a tea bag in each of them. He turned around and, without saying anything, pulled his stele from his pocket so he could activate the iratze on her neck. Once the cuts had closed, he wet a dish towel and wiped the drying blood from her knuckles.
Her eyes darted from her hands to his face and back again. "I'm sorry I let you down tonight. All of you."
Alec turned back to the sink, rinsing the towel until the water ran clear. "I shouldn't have let you on the mission. I knew you weren't ready."
"But I wanted to be," Clary protested.
Alec rolled his eyes. "That's not how it works."
"I know that, genius. I just- I thought that now I know I'm a Shadowhunter, I'd know how to be one."
The kettle whistled. Alec removed it from the stove and poured the water into the mugs. "Most Shadowhunters spend their whole lives studying what you're learning now. It's going to take time."
"I don't have time. I have to find my mom and the Cup and stop Valentine-" Clary was pacing now, walking swiftly between the kitchen countertop and the table.
"That's not on you."
She stopped pacing. "Even if it's not, I'm- this is my heritage, you know? It's a part of my identity that's been missing my whole life, and now that I've got it- I just-" She sighed. "I want to make up for lost time."
That was the moment. There, standing in the kitchen at three-thirty in the morning, was the moment where Alec Lightwood saw Clary Fairchild for the first time. She wasn't a nuisance, or liability, or a mundie playing at being a superhero. She was a girl who had been lied to her whole life, who'd had an entire part of herself hidden from her, and she was trying. She fought every day, to prove to herself and her mother and everyone in the Institute that she was a Shadowhunter. That she belonged there. Alec knew what it was like to break yourself trying to live up to someone's expectations. Even when they were your own. Especially when they were your own.
He held out the mug of tea. She took it. He offered no advice, she offered no thanks. They simply stood there and drank, connected in a way they hadn't been before.
He never told anyone about that night, or the numerous subsequent ones where she'd follow him to the kitchen after a particularly rough hunt. They'd drink their tea together, sometimes talking, sometimes not, and when they went to bed they'd both feel a little less alone.
Alec wonders who she drinks tea with now. If she has someone else who knows just how long to steep it for so it doesn't get bitter. If she stands there in the kitchen, bare feet sticking to the tile, and leans against the counter, looking at her companion. He hopes she isn't alone. He hopes she has people who care about her, who wipe the blood off her knuckles and tell her, not in so many words, that the weight of the world does not rest on her shoulders alone.
