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They’re lying on the roof of Simon’s van, far enough outside any city boundaries that they can see the stars above them. It’s a mild night in April, the slightest amount breezy, and the sky is inky and black behind the twinkling stars overhead. Jace’s mind feels clear for the first time in a long time.
Driving with Simon is - interesting. He talks so much, mostly to himself because Jace had said so little on the several hours they’d driven. He sticks his tongue out sometimes when he’s concentrating or he furls his brow. He sings along to songs that Jace doesn’t know and will probably never hear again, and talks back to the random ads playing on the radio as if they can hear him.
Something about it is so - easy. Simon is so unafraid of making noise - he’s loud. He shouts at asshole drivers, like a New Yorker through and through, he hums and taps his fingers on anything and everything, and it’s all just so uncontained. Simon is messy. Jace feels like a spring coiled so tightly all the time - the only times he ever gets to feel loose is when he sits in the Hunter’s Moon with daggers glared at the back of his head, or when he goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night and catches sight of his reflection in the mirror over the sink and he sees the monster he feels inside and he only vomits up bile because he skipped dinner again.
Jace thinks they're somewhere in Pennsylvania from the bits and pieces he actually paid attention to on the road. Four hours out of New York and with every mile that passed under them, Jace felt the knots in his chest loosen.
(Him and Clary have been weird ever since they broke up. It's always tense, an undercurrent of an unspoken fight between them as they stand at opposite sides of the Ops table, but they're civil and curt and professional.
He doesn't know where they went wrong. Maybe they were doomed from the start - that's how things tend to go for Jace. They dove headfirst into a war together holding hands as if that was a substitute for a relationship. They were only ever curious about each other, dazzled by the sight of something so new, so unknown that they had to chase it. There was no other choice.
And nothing even happened - no screaming match or bust up or whatever Jace thinks should have warranted him feeling the need to run away so intensely. He saw the back of Clary's hair; it was so vibrant and fiery in the midst of the white digital glow of the Institute's ever-growing collection of screens and interfaces. She didn't even turn around, didn't even know he was there at all. And yet the lump in his throat formed and the back of his eyes burned like he was looking directly at the sun.
He hopped in Simon's van and told Simon to drive since they were something resembling friends now, somehow, without Jace's permission. The look on Jace's face must have told Simon not to ask why, and he hit the gas while talking so much about almost nothing.)
"I think that's Mars over there," Simon says, one hand pointing vaguely at the sky. The other is resting under his head, ankles crossed and just hanging over the edge of the roof.
He resolutely doesn't think about Valentine teaching him to navigate by the stars, leaving him for a few days out in the wilderness at nine years old.
"It is," Jace tells him. He activated his Vision rune after he climbed up, so he can probably see almost as many stars as Simon can. The sky is void of clouds, one endless plane above them as they lie back on the cool metal under them. Jace feels small. He finds he kind of likes that.
"Did you know that there's robots on Mars?" Simon tells him, suddenly brimming with delight. Jace did know that - he knew it the way he knows a lot of mundane things: vaguely, with little context.
"Why?" He asks instead.
“For science!” Simon exclaims in a way that is far too excited and loud for the quiet stretch of off-road they’ve pulled onto. Some birds leave their roost in the nearby trees. He’s grinning while he does it though, so Jace doesn’t think it’s that bad. “Humans have spent their whole existence looking at the stars. People created whole gods and religions around the stars, used them to find their way home and sail to new lands. And then we managed to figure out a way to get up there.”
Simon’s hands are batting back and forth, gesturing wildly as if to make their own point. Jace doesn’t know what it is, but he looks away from the stars to watch the way Simon gets lost in his own words, hands gracefully stumbling along up his spiel, trying to keep up.
“- And you can talk about mundanes being useless, but we managed to do a lot of cool shit while you were protecting us from demons and monsters.” And then quietly, a lonely little afterthought: “Them.”
Jace makes a questioning noise, looking back up at the sky when Simon settles his hands flat on his belly.
“While you were protecting them from demons.”
It clicks for Jace after a moment. Simon isn’t a mundane - not anymore. He sounds so - sad, having to exclude himself from humanity. Jace wonders what it feels like to be one thing for your whole life and then be thrown by the reality of no longer being that thing - but then, of course, Jace gets it. It’s a smaller scale, sure, because a surname and a species change aren’t the same thing, but it’s probably in the same sphere of things. It’s the same shape, even if it’s a different size.
“What do the robots even do?” He asks, because Simon has deflated in on himself now. Before, he was vying to tell Jace all he could about space, but now the fight is gone out of him.
(Jace would never admit it to another living soul, barely admits it to himself, but he likes Simon. Too much for comfort, too much that way but even just in the reasonable friendly way. And Jace has always been far too empathetic for his own good, though he tries to pretend he isn’t along with the myriad of all the other things he pretends he isn’t. So when he has to blink away the image of his falcon’s glassy eyes when he looks at Simon, asking about fucking space robots, he maybe has to accept that him and Simon - they’re friends, or something damned close to it.)
“They… they mostly take pictures, I guess. Test the soil and atmosphere. Tell us things….” He goes quiet for a minute, and Jace doesn’t look over but in his mind’s eye he can see the way Simon’s whole face crinkles when he’s thinking, lip caught in between his teeth and his eyebrows turned downwards. “But… the Curiosity Rover sang happy birthday after it’s first year on Mars. And when the Opportunity Rover was officially taken offline, the internet was really upset. It was just a robot in space but people really gave a shit, y’know?”
Jace looks across at him then, his face filled with something he doesn’t know how to name. It’s like hope and pain and relief and everything else. It strikes Jace somewhere in his chest, makes him yearn and twist and ache.
“So, yeah, mundanes probably seem really dumb to Shadowhunters with your angel blood and divine whatever-the-fuck, but… we spent a few thousand years figuring out how to go to space, and then named the robots we sent there things like Curiosity. I don’t know.”
They’re silent for a moment. There’s no hum of electricity or traffic or even another soul for miles around. Just the two of them, breathing, the gentle rustling of the trees around them. They're completely alone.
“I guess mundanes don’t sound so bad when you put it that way.” There’s the edge of a tease that Jace hopes is just right. He doesn’t know, isn’t sure about anything anymore. The only thing he’s sure of is Simon at his side, the van under his back, and the faint, far-off flutter of Alec laughing four hours away in New York.
Without thinking about it at all, without comprehending anything he’s doing, he reaches across the foot of space between them, the metal cold to the touch, and links Simon’s fingers through his. Simon’s hand jerks, but then squeezes and holds on. It feels like opportunity. It doesn’t feel like curiosity.
They’re two very broken-down people in a breaking-down world. They don’t know where they’re going. But the stars will still be there, wherever they end up.