A/N: More scenes from Shadowhunters 3x17 and 3x9 are used in this chapter. I don't own them, Freeform does. Hope you loves enjoy a prison break! XOXOX

Devil in the Details

"Don't worry. Won't be long for either of us."

Iris was unusually chipper for this time of morning. It was Clary's suggestion to meet the former warlock down at the yard after lunch for some 'light exercise', also known as information gathering. Iris didn't know Clary was poking around for info, or if she did, she didn't care. Most of the information she offered up was the same recycled story from the first day, and the added commentary was about how the food was garbage or which guards on rotation were the most attractive. Clary was no closer to figuring out what Heavenly Fire was or why it was so bad for Downworlders. She was no closer to freeing Izzy.

This, however, was different. And it wasn't just the somber mood or audible screams.

"What do you mean?"

"Every month, the Gard holds a culling of its death row inmates," Iris said, twirling a blade of dying grass in her fingers. "They parade a few of us through the yard right up to that block and hack us to bits. I've witnessed it a few times myself now. Lots of former Circle members or Valentine supporters. Some of them even cry. Quite a show."

"Sounds horrible."

"Oh, it is!" There was that chipper tone again. As if life and death were all fun and games. "If you're lucky, they'll just burn you alive. That's what they're going to do to me, or so they say. Standard execution for traitors. We have so much to look forward to."

Unlike Iris, Clary was not in any mood to get burned alive. Just the thought of all that dry heat made her itch.

As if on cue, the doors to the yard screeched open and a new inmate was thrown out. This one was also familiar, in an equally surprising yet disturbing way.

"Raphael?" Clary could barely believe her eyes. Raphael Santiago, walking in the daylight.

He latched on to the sound of his name, finding Clary in the crowd. Iris looked on, unimpressed as Raphael walked slowly, gingerly as a newborn giraffe, over to them. He couldn't stop looking up, staring at the sun like an idiot. He ran his hands over his arms, amazed.

Clary was amazed, too. Amazed that he had not caught fire and reduced himself to a pile of ash. Last she heard of Raphael, he was chained to a roof and hissing at the rising run thanks to his wayward project, Heidi. Now, the sun agreed with his complexion, tanning him without so much as a burn.

"I don't understand."

"They injected me with something," Raphael explained, still marveling at his skin. "My body felt like it was burning from the inside out. And just when I thought I was dying, I suddenly became human again."

His story was frighteningly similar to Iris'. Clary looked over to the former warlock to see that the woman had gone even paler, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. Like she was watching a train reck and couldn't tear her eyes away.

"I...I don't know what to say," Clary stammered. This was too much world-changing information for one day.

"Do not pity me, Clary. I have no malice for this." There was a smile on Raphael's face, one of serenity and peace. "They've given me the greatest gift I could ever ask for."

"You think this is a gift?" Iris scoffed, her voice raised two octaves. "It's more like a theft."

"Iris," Clary tried to calm the woman down, but she had worked herself into a frenzy.

"They took my magic, what made me who I am. They stole my very soul. All these Downworld prisoners, they're having their powers taken away, their traits. Warlocks, werewolves, vampires, seelies. They're making them all mundane by injecting them with Heavenly Fire."

"Heavenly Fire?"

Clary hadn't heard of it before, but there were a lot of things she still didn't know about the Shadow World. Just as soon as she thought she had a grip on things, something new came out of the woodwork to knock her on her ass and prove to her that she still didn't know jack shit. Her stupidity and arrogance were part of what put Izzy in her current situation. A situation she needed to be focusing on instead of all this insanity.

"Some kind of serum. Powerful stuff. Not sure where it comes from or how it's made, just that it destroys people like Raphael, like me. Makes us less."

"This is the Clave's perverted way of rehabilitating their prisoners?"

"Aldertree, not the Clave," Iris spit on the ground at Victor's name, her face twisted in a grimace. "Bad as Valentine, that fucker is. If I still had my magic, the things I would do to him..."

Iris continued her muttering and raving, turning her back to Raphael and Clary. Raphael cast a look between the two women, lingering on Clary the longest. Then, he took her by the arm and stepped closer to the wall, careful not to look too conspiratorial as to draw attention.

"It was no coincidence that I ended up in this place with you," he said, his voice low enough that no one would overhear. "Simon is here. He is looking for you."

"Simon?" Clary squeaked, her blood pressure rising at the thought of another friend trapped in this living hell. "What is he doing - ?"

"He has concocted some scheme with Alec Lightwood in order to free you and Isabelle," Raphael explained. "We saw you out here earlier, only they won't let vampires out of their cells during daylight hours for obvious reasons. And no one knows that Simon is, well, Simon, and therefore a Daylighter. So, the only reasonable course of action was - "

"- to come here yourself," Clary finished, a whole new wave of guilt and awe washing over her. "You sacrificed yourself just to give me a message?"

"Hardly a sacrifice," Raphael replied, a grin on his lips. "I got what I wanted, and you got your message."

"Okay," Clary said, and repeated it a few times just to make sure this was really happening. This was her reality. She looked Raphael straight in the eye. "What's the plan?"

Raphael's grin widened.

"How do you feel like staring riot?"

When Clary slammed her tray down and stood atop the table in the mess hall, a hand full of grey mush poised to throw, Simon thought he was living some sort of high school comedy. When she actually let that hand fly, the grey mash landing atop the bald head of man thrice her size, Simon fought the urge to laugh. When that man stood up and roared, ripping his whole table from the ground and tossing it Clary's way, Simon was brought violently back to reality.

Prison break. Right.

"Run Simon!" Clary shouted over the chaos of the mess.

Words spurred him into action. Words, and the large man running at him. Simon ducked under muscular arms, barely escaping the crushing grip before sprinting towards the door. There was no time to think if he was headed in the right direction, no time to wonder if he'd made a massive mistake. There was only survival.

Guards poured through the doors, trying to contain the riot. They stabbed at him with electric spears, each one sizzling his skin with sunlight that would have crippled a regular vampire, but Simon kept going. The burns would be nasty in the morning; he'd need to bandage them, but he would live. He would make it out of the mess and into the hall.

By now, the rest of the inmates had heard the commotion. They rattled against the bars of their cells, shouting and jeering as the guards stationed by their doors tried to keep them at bay. But not for long.

There was control station by the mess entrance. Simon pressed every button at the abandoned station on his way by, releasing inmates indiscriminately. He spared no second thoughts about the morality of the act, about the consequences of turning violent, dangerous creatures loose. All he could think about was creating a distraction big enough to buy him enough time to get to Izzy.

Four floors up, two lefts then a right, Alec recited the directions straight to Simon's brain.

Vampire speed was inhibited with the stupid cuffs on his wrist, and Simon was never the most athletic person. He pushed his body to the limit as he ascended stairs to find the right hall. The right door. The right cell.

Chaos had reached even these heights. The bodies of the few guards not called to the mess hall laid scattered around, blood staining the walls. Simon tried not to linger, not to panic as he reached the right floor. He hoped and prayed Izzy had not been touched.

Finally, he found the door Clary drew for him: the unmarked one made of thick metal with complex locks. He hadn't thought about how to get in. Thankfully, an unconscious guard laid slumped on the wall nearby. Simon dragged his body over and slapped his hand on the bioscanner. Lights lit up green and the locks clicked open.

Things were going scarily well. It made Simon's nonexistent pulse jump. He had no idea what awaited him behind this door.

It was a good thing he was a Daylighter, because the fluorescent light pouring out from the back of the room would have incinerated him on the spot. For such a dark, dismal prison, this space was a ray of synthetic sunlight. Simon had to squint so his eyes could adjust. He placed a hand above his eyes, creating a visor as he pushed forward.

"Izzy!"

He ran down the long hall to the glass cage at the end of the room. It was surrounded by machinery, most of it far more advanced than Simon even thought possible. There was no telling what this cell was hooked up to, or what they were doing to the small, fierce girl curled on the bed inside.

"Simon?" she asked, her voice cracking with disbelief. She got up from her bed and walked to the front. She placed her hand on the glass. "Is that...is that really you?"

"Yeah, it's me."

Relief flooded his bones. He ran and placed a hand up to meet hers, soaking in every tired inch of her. Her hair was knotted, her eyes cratered by dark circles, her white clothes dinged grey and splattered with what he hoped was not her blood. Most alarming of all was the swell of her stomach poking out against the boxy cut of her top.

He couldn't help but stare.

"You...you're...?"

It was hard to reconcile what he was seeing. Not that he thought Izzy would make a bad mother, but..she had only been gone a few weeks. Weeks ago her stomach was definitely flatter.

"I know I promised you answers," she said sadly, softly.

The hand that wasn't against the glass rest on top of the bump. From underneath, the steady thump of her own pulse, a second, quicker pulse fluttered. The same noise he thought he heard on the balcony of Magnus' apartment the night that everything went to hell. Suddenly, so many things made sense.

"I knew I wasn't hearing things," he said, more to himself than her.

Izzy laughed. It was a beautiful sound.

"I want every detail," he insisted, pushing himself from the glass in search of a great big exit button. "As soon as we're home."

"Home," she repeated. "Sounds nice."

It really did. Simon had only been inside the Gard for a day and he was itching to return to his apartment. Izzy had been here weeks. He could only imagine the horrors she had seen in that amount of time.

There was no exit button, much to Simon's dismay. Did they really have to make this stuff so complicated? The scientists that used these machines must have been faking it, because there was no rhyme nor reason to any of the buttons and levers. Monitors attached themselves to what looked to be giant computers that attached themselves to a whole number of things. Some of those things led to the other side of the room.

Following the wires, Simon found himself faced with a table filled with test tubes. These test tubes were filled with liquid that matched all the others. Looking back, there were more tables of the stuff. Whole benches. Crates.

"What...what is all this?"

"It's Heavenly Fire," Izzy said in that sad, soft tone. "Aldertree injected me with it. It's how he got me to Alicante, this holy space. It...it destroys demonic DNA."

Charts on the table showed figures surrounded by equations Simon didn't have the brain to parse. He flipped the page and there was something he could understand: pictures. Pictures of a werewolf pre and post transformation. Pictures of a warlock with their mark in one photo, missing it the next. Like it was never there. Names and faces all blurred out and reduced to serial numbers. To results.

Simon's heart hadn't beat in a year, but that didn't mean the gut-wrenching feeling of something terribly wrong didn't make it stutter.

"That's what made Raphael mundane."

Izzy's eyes filled with tears. "Raphael...he's here?"

"Yes. He's here. He and dozens of other Downworlders Aldertree has been snatching up for his twisted experiments."

Anger pushed between Simon's eyes, blurring his vision. He'd seen enough. This was no longer just about freeing Izzy and Clary. There was something far bigger, far more sinister at work and he had to stop it. He had to -

"Simon...I've been listening to Aldertree as he works, and it's so much worse," Izzy said, real fear coating her words. "The things he's told me...the things he wants to do not only to me, but to the whole Downworld..."

He abandoned the charts and moved closer. "Izzy...what's he planning?"

"Aldertree wants to use the serum beyond the prison population. He has a plan to slip it into the water supply in New York City as a trial run for worldwide disbursement."

"So all Downworlders get 'cured' whether they like it or not."

The idea was horrific. No, it was unimaginable. The number of lives that would be ruined. The number of lives that would be lost. Whole cultures, gone. Whole populations left to fend for themselves in a harsh and unforgiving world.

It would be naive to think that Shadowhunters would just let transformed Downworlders live in peace. It would be naive to think that vampires, werewolves, seelies and all the others would not be hunted down and exterminated with no way to fight back. And that was if they all lived, if Aldertree's poison didn't kill a majority of them upon contact.

Someone had to do something. He had to do something.

But he had to get Izzy out first.

Scrambling and searching, more frantic than ever. It was pointless to try and press all the buttons; something could hurt Izzy in the process. But he didn't have any better ideas. His finger hovered over the first button on the closest console and then -

Light.

A ring of it cast around the floor, separating him from the machinery that would free Izzy.

"Careful." Simon recognized that voice. It was the same voice that greeted him so kindly upon arrival. He turned to see the young woman with the blonde braid and soft-sharp features. "That light'll burn."

The guard smiled. She really thought she had him pinned. The shock on her face as Simon stepped through the light barrier without any harm was comical. Any other day and he would have stopped to enjoy it. But he had just blown his cover, and this whole situation was about to escalate from bad to worse if he couldn't disarm the guard.

"How is this possible?" The guard stammered. Her hand flexed on her blade, ready to fight at a moment's notice.

"I'm a Daylighter."

Simon made the mistake of waving his hands around. Out came that blade, its sharp edge pointed against the apple of his throat. The guard caught his right in her iron grip, turning his hand over and bringing it to her face.

"Where did you get this?" she asked, pointing to the ring. At some point, the glamour had slipped, revealing the band.

"It's a priceless Russo family heirloom," he lied.

"No. It's a Seelie whisper ring, developed for Seelie spies to aid in the French Revolution."

"Agree to disagree."

"Trust me, I know what I'm talking about."

The blade dug in a little deeper. Deep enough to break the skin, a thin trickle of blood dripping from the puncture, the smell of copper flooding his nose, making his fangs pop. He kept his mouth firmly shut, forcing the fangs back, not wanting to give the guard another reason to cut his head clear from his shoulders.

"Simon!"

Izzy yelled and banged on the glass, giving away his cover but he could not have cared less. He was already in the line of fire. There was only so much time he could waste on this problem. Only so much time left to save Izzy. Besides, he'd already found his loose threads. They were poking out from behind her nest of blonde hair: the tips of pointed ears.

"You're a Seelie?"

"Half. Dad's a Shadowhunter, Mom's a Seelie."

She was defensive now, the grip on his hand tighter than ever, the grip on her blade just as deadly. He was pinned between a guard and hard place, and he was running out of time.

"So, what? You think a couple of runes makes you better than the rest of us?"

"No." She took genuine offense from the statement.

"Then why are you torturing fellow Downworlders?"

"Torture? I don't know what you're talking about."

"Look around you! Look at what's going on right now," Simon implored as the ground shook and people screamed. "Guards are beating inmates right outside these doors. Your boss is making people disappear, and he's changing them. You can hear the screams - "

"Why are you really here?" she cut him off, her jaw clenched tight.

He gestured to Izzy wildly, knowing he must look crazy now, but he was past the point of caring. "They have kept her in a cage because she might have associated too closely with something from the Downworld!"

"Isabelle Lightwood is sick. She needs our help - "

"Does she look sick to you?" Simon shouted, at his wit's end. "She's tired and she's scared and she wants to go home. That's all I want. That's why we are here. We just want our friend to come home."

Simon, I have your coordinates, Alec said through their connection, urgent as the alarms blaring all around him. Do you have Clary and Izzy?

"You got me." Simon said, raising his one free hand in surrender. He ignored Alec's pestering, focusing solely on the girl holding his life in her hands. "My name's not Zeke, and I didn't kill anyone. I just need to save my best friend's life. Please. That's the only reason I'm here, I swear."

He was locked in a stalemate. Neither he nor the guard were moving, her eyes unflinching and hard.

Simon, are you there? Alec asked, panic lacing his tone. I hope you can hear me, because you need to know what's going on.

The guard let go. The light disappeared. The next moment, the locks on Izzy's prison hissed open, the glass parting to let her stumble out and straight into his arms.

"Hey, hey it's okay," Simon soothed as Izzy fell into his embrace. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly to him and pressing his nose into her hair. The scent of blood was strong - doubled thanks to her newfound condition - and it sang a beautiful melody as it coursed through her veins. It wasn't tempting. It was a comforting sound, the best sound in the world. "You okay?"

"Better," Izzy said with a smile. She was so tired, barely strong enough to stand let alone fight her way out of this prison.

Together, they faced the guard who wasn't quite their ally, not quite their enemy.

"I thought I was here to help people, rehabilitate the prisoners," the guard said, self-deprection and loathing coating her every word. "Instead, I just found out that I was helping Aldertree create a weapon of mass destruction against Downworlders." Her eyes shone like diamonds, so much harder and brilliant than her age. She stared Simon and Izzy down. "You can't let him do that."

"I don't plan on it," Izzy replied, strength in her conviction despite the fact that she could barely hold herself upright.

"Look, I might be a Shadowhunter, but I'm a Downworlder, too, and no one gets to take that away from me," the guard said, straightening her stance, bracing herself. "But I can't stop him by myself."

"You're not by yourself," Izzy said, reaching out and clutching her by the forearm. "You have us."

The resolve in the guard's eyes started to crumble. The cold exterior melted to show the scared girl inside. It reminded Simon that they were just teenagers, that no matter how this war had changed people, they were still just scared kids. Maybe in order to make changes this was all it really took: letting someone know they weren't alone.

"We need to destroy his supply of Heavenly Fire. Now."

"How?"

"An explosion. The compound is highly flammable. If we set one alight, it will catch the others and blow this whole place to ash."

"There are hundreds of prisoners here," Simon pointed out. "And many of them are mundane now. They won't stand a chance."

"The room. Aldertree made a point of saying it was the most secure lab in the Gard." Izzy looked to her glass cage all the way up to the high ceilings. "We can set the charge and seal the doors behind us."

It wasn't a fool-proof plan, but it was the best they had. There wasn't any time to come up with an alternative.

As Simon went to look for matches, he was stopped by the guard. She stuck out her hand, a peace offering. "I'm Helen. Helen Blackthorn."

"Simon Lewis." He took her hand and shook it once. Her grip was as firm as the rest of her.

A smile curved up her lips. "Nice to meet you, properly this time."

Helen was the one who found the jug of rubbing alcohol in the supply closet. They poured it on the floor, on the tables, all around the vials of Heavenly Fire, tapering off to a trail a safe distance away so they could drop a match and run. Simon held the pack in his shaking hands.

He could do this. He could do -

"Wait!"

At the end of the hall appeared Clary, hair wild and whipping around her as she ran. A woman Simon didn't recognize was hot on Clary's heels. And behind her, Raphael. It was so strange to see him running like a mundane instead of the blur of vampire speed. His face was red from exertion, sweat beaded at his brow. But as soon as his eyes latched onto Izzy, all of that seemed to fade away. Raphael Santiago, the badass vampire clan leader, went soft at the sight of Isabelle Lightwood.

Izzy smiled too, body listing forward to try and meet him. They were still so far away, separated not only by physical space but by a tumultuous history. A distance that seemed like it could be bridged with each step closer.

Then, Aldertree turned the opposite corner, vengeance in his eyes and a knife in his hand.

He set his sights on them and let the blade go flying.