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Jace watches the sun set out the stained glass window of his room. He's done this every night since he came back (came home), watched the colors bleed from orange to pink to purple before darkening to a deep deep greenish blue. Light pollution. It's never really dark in New York City, not like it is in Idris—he'd watched the sun set there, too, seen the stars come out in the pitch-black sky and wished for home, home where everything is light and color and noise at all times of day. The quiet blackness of his father's house is deceptive, pretending to be peaceful when just under the surface lies the violence and disorder of a madman. Jace never liked sunsets until he came here. In New York, the sunset is just beautiful. Nothing stops just because the sun went down, and he can always distract himself in the city if he needs to: can walk and not be alone, even at night; can go find a party or a club and blend, invisible, with the mundanes; can take his mind off his reality and pretend for a few minutes or hours that he's not himself, that he's someone who's life is simple and straightforward and isn't running from demons both literal and metaphorical.
Tonight, though, he isn't thinking about escape. He’s thinking about the colors, the way the pinks of the sky meet with the darker ones of the stained glass, and comparing them to a painting Clary gave him yesterday. She’d painted the sunset, too—they sat together on the roof and looked out at it, and she painted as the light faded. They’re working towards being friends, now that they can't be anything else, and Jace appreciates the effort she's been making to do normal things like that with him, although just now he's thinking that she didn't get the colors quite right. Too orange. Maybe last night was different. Maybe the window is distorting the color of tonight's sunset. Either way, it's a purer pink than Clary's painting, not peachy, just a bright bubblegum color that Jace can't help but love. He's tried to take pictures, but they don't do it justice. It's something about the way the light is interacting with the clouds, and it's perfect,but so incredibly impermanent that it can't be captured. He thinks maybe it shouldn't be called bubblegum pink, it should be called perfect sunset pink, where the clouds look like cotton candy for some gigantic being, perfectly fluffy and light.
Of course, the color only lasts a few minutes before it's lost it's brightness and begun to fade, but he can't help but let it stick in his mind. He thinks it might be his favorite color, not that he'll tell anyone—and who else knows what perfect-sunset pink looks like, anyway?