* infernal devices au / set in the world of Cassandra Clare's works

1423 

It's an unexpected first meeting, because it takes place at dawn one night in the summer as he walks home from the workshop, keys jingling in his pocket and walking stick in hand. He holds on tighter to the jade that is situated on top of his cane, his palm scratching over the fist-sized gem as he wobbles along the cobbled street at the dead of the night where he can hear his own heart beating inside his ribcage because the silence was too great and vast.

His shoes make a clicking sound as he goes, and it resonates throughout the neighborhood as he takes step by step, one at a time, slowly as he walks, unbalanced, towards home. 

He finds her in the shadows of the alleyway between the baker and the butcher's shop, hunched down and laying crumpled on the ground. It's mandatory for a gentleman to help a lady in need and he feels himself go cold at the sight, never had he seen one so gruesome as a maiden with her dress covered in blood and sticking onto her hair at the dead of night. With his heart threatening to jump out of him due to shock, he flips her over and sees that she's as pale as ash.

Though she looks as dead as someone could be, that doesn't quite stop him from placing his cane on the ground and kneeling down on both knees, one feeling number than the other, and scooping half of her cold body in his arms. There is no heaving of the chest, no movement, nothing, and his own heart stops at this. 

She is beautiful. In a way snow is beautiful; cold and icy yet delicate all the same. She is like that, her beauty is like that as she lays in his arms with blood running down the side of her silk dress, it's fair color smeared with scarlet under the moonlight.

"Save me," her lips that are like cherries speak out to him. Her face is that of snow, and her body is that of freezing temperature and yet she still lives, he is curious to know why yet he is glad all the same that he can feel himself break into cold sweat. She had seem so lifeless, so dead that -

"Save me."

Her eyes shot open which ensues a gasp from him, and she grins a nasty grin; a grin Lucifer might have worn moments before falling down from heaven. Her eyes are the color of the blood on her side which had turned crimson and deadly. Only, now he realizes it isn't her blood exactly that's on the side of her dress.

He stumbles and falls on his bottom, and it's too late.

She kisses his soul, and then takes it away with a bite on his neck making him scream bloody murder one second and go utterly silent the next.

He is limp, he is cold, he is empty.

She stays by his side, in the darkness of the night, watching him transform into a predator like her. 

There is a pang in his chest and the blood just stops flowing. His heart stops beating, ceasing all actions and he can't breathe because vampires - the kinds of Downworlders he was warned about - never needed air. They never really needed anything except for blood and wrath and attention. She was just like them, she is one of them and he was too different. 

His eyes opens and it's nearing sunrise. She's no longer there with him, long gone maybe. 

He sees the world in red and black, but despite that, he likes how he can feel his leg again. 

1594 

He has lived off on the blood of mundane criminals - thieves and murderers mostly - for nearly a century now and yet the sweetness of their blood never cease to bore him and the dead tastebuds on his pale tongue. Mundanes are sweet to the core, though not all, but most of them anyways especially ones that take good care of themselves. 

Once, he had feasted upon the blood of a beautiful girl with long black hair and lips so naturally red that they were like crushed cherries against his own when he had kissed her, and then killed her so mercilessly right afterwards. It had been thirty years ago, and nobody has tasted so good compared to that maiden.

He is still searching for a victim, one with a good sense of health in them, yet he still has not found one unbelievably enough. Many do not realize the foolishness humans - these low-rated mundanes - cast upon themselves just to have everything go their way. 

Mino had never believed he had once been human, not until that night she turned him. Ever since, he had lived off the way he should, like a predator constantly searching for the perfect prey. 

And speaking of which, his eyes scan the busy Parisian streets but he sees nobody worth his energy. He places a hand on his chest, where his heart should be beating and alive, it was dead as it had been all these years. Mino narrows his eyes, taking in every person that passed by him.

He sees a familiar face among unfamiliar ones, and she's grinning straight at him from across the busy bodies with her fangs protruding just slightly out from her upper lip.

She winks, turns around and twirls the parasol behind her before disappearing and blending in with the mundane crowd. It is the first time he sees her face ever since that night, and he somehow knows it will be the last in a long while. 

1694

The organ was meant for solemn tunes and religious purposes, but seeing it in a bar just outside of London made him smile in amusement because the drunks were obviously enjoying at playing it so badly that half of the customers went out of the pub, all looking very pinched and crossed. 

The pub owner had to shoo the drunkards away, and that's when he takes his seat on the stool hand on the lower keys as he starts to play something that was still, after all this time, familiar to his ice-like fingers as it was in his head. His mother had taught him how to play, and how he treasures the talent so.

"Oi, bug off the organ, mate. Stop playing ancient tunes." the words are slurred and obviously the gentleman saying them is somewhat slurry in the head himself, so Mino ignores this and the fact that the man had categorized his mother's favorite song  an "ancient tune". 

Under his breathe, he mutters to himself about not losing temper. Not now when he was supposed to be keeping a low profile. "Have more than you show, speak less than you know." he told himself.

"Ah, quoting Shakespeare, I see." 

He merely glances to the figure that has it's arm bent over the organ's top, her body leaning onto it as if it were not precious enough to be handled with care. She looked at him through red-rimmed eyes and he could see that she had been running, because she looked absolutely windswept and wild. 

"Do you mind?" she pushes his hands away and she sits on the stool next to his, fingers on the keys and warming up to play. "I'd rather not listen to your melodic tunes of you brooding nor would I like to have remained standing and listening to you quoting off one of the most mediocre poets of this time."

He has an eyebrow raised just as she plays something more lively which is a surprise considering this was an organ of all instruments, but at the moment it sounded more like a flute than an organ. "I take it you did not like Romeo and Juliet,"

She snorts, which is unladylike but she had always been vampire first and lady, second. "Found it rather trashy, especially towards the end. Killing one's self just because they weren't patient enough. Such insensible things mundanes are, are they not?"

"Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters."

"So is Boadicea," like him, her eyes are on her fingers as they play and the two of them were too busy to notice that everyone in the pub started to be in a lighter mood, in a happier state because of her playing. "And look at her! All female warrior and no man, quite the gal I must say."

Mino represses back a smile, but he can't help it. He places an arm over her waist, aware that this was not proper in public for some but they were at a pub and people were too drunk on their bliss from rum to even mind them. "Boadicea is real, you know. She's Welsh and belongs in a Celtric tribe, Irene." he says her name coolly as if the decades never went by them ever since he saw her in the streets of Paris. 

"She's as fictional as Juliet for all I care." she says, rolling her eyes to stop playing. "Anyways, have you heard of the gossip that is hot and fiery in the Downworld these days?"

He met her eyes, and there is something so solid behind them that her smile seemed real to him as any smile a girl had given him. She seemed so normal, so mundane in that moment as she looked up and smiled at him that i