My Beautiful One

27. Little of heart

I knew I'd never intended to speak of love, but there had been a dark cloud hanging over the three of us since we'd joined in the middle of the training room. I was pretty sure that this dark cloud was composed entirely of love-induced anger, frustration, and sorrow, and I felt like I was speaking for everyone when I said: "Whoever said that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all should never have let that saying become so popular."

"Why?" Asked Alec, for the first time since I'd met him showing the tiniest bit of humour in the form of sarcasm, "Could it be because they were a condescending ass who had obviously never loved?"

"Of course not." Said Jace, and then he chucked one of his knives across the room. It stuck right in the center of a target, and had he been in any other company, they would have been shocked and impressed by this almost unfeasibly skilled action. But Alec and I knew Jace well, and were more impressed by the extremely long list of insults he rattled off about Alfred Lord Tennyson, who somewhere between 'heartless git' and something that sounded a lot like 'ducking glass mole' had been named. This informed Alec and I of the name of the writer of the saying we were now so angry with, which gave us good ammunition for our own insults.

Around twenty minutes later, Tennyson was still being mouthed off.  We were yelling out insults and mean remarks in every language we knew while also pretty much destroying the training room. It wasn't that we really hated Tennyson that much: we just all had so much anger and frustration to let go of, and blaming it all on the dead seemed like the best option.

"Oblivious old codger who had nothing to do other than sit around and write poems!" I yelled, picking up a training dummy, hurling it across the room, and proceeding to kick it. Some people say that having a good long cry and eating ice cream can help you get over a broken heart. Me, I prefer swearing in a mixture of Demonic and English while kicking the crap out of a training dummy.

"He obviously never had to fight in a war." Said Alec savagely, slicing a chair right in half with a long sword.

"I hope he got the demon pox." Jace snarled, kicking a rack of knives over and sending weapons clattering to the floor.

"I hope he's burning in hell!" 

A punching bag exploded.

"I hope that he meets Valentine there!"

A balance beam was cut in half.

"I hope that-"

"You know what I hope?" A voice interrupted Jace, right before he hit a punching bag so hard that it exploded. That left him standing in a heap of sand, glaring at this new person, who looked back with a certain defensiveness to her stance.

"Hey Isabelle." I greeted her, taking a step away from the dummy. She didn't respond at all; didn't even tell us what it was that she hoped. Isabelle Lightwood just stared at us with wide eyes, her face a pale smudge between the long dark curtains of hair that fell either side of it. Not feeling particularly patient, with annoyance in my tone I said, "Well if you want to train, I'm sorry, because right now, we're destroying this room and we're not planning on-"

"I hope that I never see Simon Lewis between now and my inevitable death in this war." She said, now interrupting me. This time, I wasn't irritated by her actions, because I knew her reason for being here: she wanted to make our heartbreak trio into a heartbreak quartet.

I didn't know Simon Lewis very well. Much like Magnus Bane, I only really knew him from talking with Clary and the Lightwoods, and had only seen him once or twice. I hadn't thought much of the thin, brown-haired, not-really-a-proper-vampire boy, and thought that he had just been some mundane with the Sight when he walked into the Institute. I'd found out in various later conversations that he was Clary's best friend, and he and Isabelle had something romantic going on. But now I assumed that there was something going wrong in their relationship, and if Isabelle was anything like her two brothers, she'd come here to do a bit of frustration-releasing destruction.