#circle11

[aimsurplus]

Not all Ak mags are created equal. Crazy commies #ak47 #akmagazine #kalishnikov #76239 #radom #circle11

[ourheartsbeatas1]

Love’s Labour’s Lost ||

(Circle!verse)

Days passed.

It was easier to return to the routine of his life, easier to bury himself in missions. The temporary truce that Jace’s team had had during the Starkweather mission lasted only until Alicia had walked into the infirmary that night, and hoping for any sort of professionalism after that was an exercise in futility. It hadn’t taken much for her to put two and two together, not with their hands bloody and the look on Jace’s face, and this information soon found its way to Adam.

Everything returned to the way things had been before Lydia’s little speech, except now it was just that little bit worse. Still, he supposed that he could live with the snide comments. Jace had never been ashamed of himself in the past, but neither was he stupid enough to ignore the stigma of this sort of relationship, and he figured that if he kept his head down and carried on, things would die down eventually.

The only problem with that strategy was the fact that Alec was basically a prisoner here. The vast majority of shadowhunters still viewed the man as a threat, a walking symbol of the war that had taken the lives of their family and friends, and while what Jace did in the privacy of his own room could be overlooked with time, sleeping with their enemy-- reformed or otherwise-- was not quite on the same level. 

Even the hunters that shared Clary’s ideology had started giving him a wide berth, and though Clary herself was unchanged, she couldn’t be by his side at all times. She had her own missions to attend to and she’d been spending more time with Isabelle to boot, and though Jace tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy with Alec, it was getting harder by the day.

He’d wanted to tell him about the ring. He was going to, that night at the infirmary, but when Alicia had come in... Jace knew that he still needed his father. He couldn’t give him up just yet, not if he wanted to survive this. Because Valentine Morgenstern was a psychopath and a liar, but he was also strong, and Jace had no doubt that if no one had chosen to follow him in his mad quest, he’d have done it all, anyway. 

No, his father was a survivor, more than capable of walking his chosen path alone, and Jace needed to relearn how to do this. He’d grown too complacent after Alec had appointed himself to watching his back months ago, growing dependent on someone else for the first time since he’d been sent to live with the Whitehallows. 

It was a terrifying thought.

‘To love is to destroy, and to be loved is to be the one destroyed,’ Valentine had said one night. Jace had told him that hostility was spreading, and his ever perceptive father had easily guessed the reason. “Attachments don’t make you stronger.”

Jace had set his jaw; surely it couldn’t be that simple. “But shadowhunters have relationships all the time,” he said. “A balance--”

“We are warriors, first and foremost,” Valentine interrupted. “We are born to serve, and some of us are meant to render greater services than others. I raised you to be the latter, and getting involved too deeply with anyone-- woman or man,” and his mouth twisted in distaste at the word. “Will only weaken your resolve.”

The conversation had gone on well into the night, but Valentine’s parting shot had been the most jarring of all. “You can deny your complacency all you want,” he’d said. “But you cannot deny fact. If you truly are as strong as I raised you to be, you would never have needed Alexander’s help to escape from Chernobyl. The boy I raised would have found a way to do it himself.”

And then he had gone, breaking the connection and leaving Jace in the silent dark.

He couldn’t give Alec up. He wouldn’t. But neither could he continue to rely on him-- not on missions and certainly not here. Weakness would get him killed, and in the long run, Alec would probably respect him more if he didn’t need to keep coming to his rescue.

With that in mind, Jace tried to fall back into some semblance of normalcy in their relationship. He’d had to avoid him that first night, but wrangling his team to finish their mission report had gone on for much longer than necessary and he had good reason to pass on it, and the day after that had seen his team assigned to recon. By the time the second day rolled around, enough time had passed that Jace could brush off his absence with an apology, avoiding the topic that Alec had brought up at the infirmary altogether.

But things weren’t the same. He could sense it as much as Alec could, and the difference was that a month ago, Alec wouldn’t have bothered to push. Jace could sense the tension between them, as if the unspoken confession he’d tried to make in the infirmary was hanging above them still, and had it just been his own guilt, he would’ve been able to ignore it. But Alec kept trying to bring it up and Jace’s deflections were mediocre at best. He wasn’t used to people asking after him; he wasn’t good at lying.

The final straw came the night before, when Jace had met Alec’s attempt to talk with a sexual overture that had resulted in Alec storming out of his room. It was probably a testament to how much the other man had changed over the handful of weeks he’d been here, because his partner was many things but preferring conversation over sex had never been an attribute of his. Until now.

Jace meant to mend things with him tonight, he really did, but the mission his team had been assigned to had run well into the night. With the Institute’s forces split between raids on the Circle and their actual duties with keeping demons at bay, everyone was being run ragged, and Jace was no exception. They’d been assigned to tail an Eidolon who’d been dealing human blood of all things, and when Jace had found himself elbow deep in an alley swarming with demons, his team had been conveniently elsewhere.

Predictably, they’d shown up after the dust had settled, with Jace covered in demon ash and ichor and in the middle of passing his stele over the iratze at his side. “Oh. You’re still alive,” Adam had said, and the disappointment in his voice was almost enough to make Jace take a swing at him right there.

Instead, he forced the anger down, remembering his father’s words and smirking coldly. “I’ve been carrying your dead weight for years, Midcross,” Jace said. “You don’t have to pretend for Alicia’s benefit. You’ll be taking credit for my work for quite a long time to come.”

Satisfaction over the furious expression on Adam’s face lasted all the way until they were back at the Institute, with Jace turning the handle on the door to his room and finding that it was unlocked.

There was a brief flare of adrenaline before he realized that it was Alec, and relief flooded him at the realization. Jace hadn’t meant to make him angry last night, and though he’d been thinking to postpone an apology to the day after (when he was more presentable and not covered in bits of demon), Alec’s presence told him that perhaps he wanted to fix things between them, too.

“Hey.” Jace paused, shutting the door behind himself. “I’m glad you’re here. I owe you an apology for last night, and I--” But then his eyes fell on the state of his room, at the false bottom of his drawer laid out on top of his bed, and his breath froze in his chest.

“Have you been going through my things?”