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They’ve been circling each other - always circling but missing each other by a hair’s width, so close; an impending collision.
They date the same girl, they drink at the same bar, they save the world - doing it all inches away from each other, seconds away from colliding. Fate is biding it's time for it to happen at the least opportune moment, for the world to fall apart and for Jace and Simon to smash into each other so hard they both shatter.
Jace acts like he is made of marble - carved by a talented sculptor, and maybe that's why he was so drawn to Clary way back when, before they knew the world was ending and before they knew each other, like Jace was searching for whoever put him together now that he was starting to feel the weak points. He wanted Clary to fix the cracks in him - but he is not made of stone, no matter how much he pretends that his heart is, and Clary is a painter - if she had tried, she would have just covered them up in strokes of cadmium yellow.
Simon feels like he’s made up of a cloth stretched too tight over a loom - woven and pulled, and woven and pulled, and woven and pulled, until he started to fray, and it’s not why him and Clary were best friends but it definitely helped him to see that someone could always be a Fray and not rip apart. Clary is a painter, not a weaver - if she had tried, the fabric of his life would be filled with messy threads that would choke him.
Clary is not a bad person; Simon and Jace are not bad people. People are just not made to fix each other - and they had to learn that the hard way because Life does not give them hints or clues, give handbooks or cheats. Life lets life happen as it may and the dice will fall where they do and they’ll just have to deal with it.
They grow towards each other - the same bar and the same girl, saving the world with their elbows inches away from each other's on the counter top where it’s sticky no matter how much Maia wipes it down, the distance closing and closing while they wait for their car-crash ending, wrapping each other’s hearts around metaphorical lamp posts, because with their luck this will only occur in disaster.
Jace always laughs like its startled out of him, like he's always surprised, like he's never laughed before. Simon watches him throw his head back, catching a blush in the dim light of the Hunter’s Moon where the regulars still glare at them.
Simon laughs like it’s the default, like Simon always starts on giddy and goes from there with it. Jace peeks glimpses of Simon’s teeth while he giggles as they walk back to his apartment on a cool night in January, knowing they’re feinting something innocent when really they are Simon’s greatest weapon.
Circling, circling - always circling, waiting for a swipe or a hand or a blow or a something else, neither knows; both braced but leaning in towards affection because soldiers are probably the loneliest of people, wanting to be touched but so staunchly against it that sometimes it’s what ends up killing them.
They both died by the hands of people they had loved, or thought they loved at one point - Camille poisons him with her venom, soothes him with the bite and tosses him aside when his body gives up; Valentine stabs him with his knife, and cradles him as he falls to the floor, as if he even cares at all about the child he stole.
They’ve both visited the place that they both somehow remember and don’t-remember - the cool, quiet dark where they had loitered, fate as yet undecided. They’re both living on time Clary borrowed for them, brute forced out of the hands of the Reaper as it hovered over their prone bodies, by lakeside or under dirt.
The irony being, of course, Clary gives them borrowed time, and she's the one who gets taken first. In many ways, in all the ways that even seem to matter anymore, she is dead. She's still alive out there, but she doesn't know what her past held and what her future could have been, if only the Angels were more forgiving to the people who are only trying to fix the world instead of fixing themselves, even if those worlds were small enough to just be singular people.
They save the world by dying, and it means that their grief gets overlooked, shadowed in the celebration of the world not ending even though they had ceased to exist, for minutes or hours, but yes, they were gone, and tomorrow continued to come without them as if they’d never been there in the first place, as if it didn’t even matter. The world did not need them unless it needed them to save it.
Simon and Jace would not say they are the same - but history tells us otherwise because there they are, together, lives plummeting along similar tracks; they live, they die, they love - the order doesn’t matter, because they hit the same beats, trains at the crossroads where they keep missing each other by fractions of somethings that are slowly getting smaller and smaller with each pass.
They drink, and they breathe, regardless of if they need to, sitting in bar stools that spin in circles; circling, always circling each other even though they know that the only way this ends is with calamity, with tragedy, as if this is a deviation from the norm - they’ve been tragedies all their lives, walking in the wake of old blights, their own little end-of-the-world that never quite comes.
And so they march on towards hell or something like it, because they both believe themselves to be damned, shouldering too much for young men who only ever wanted to tumble fingers along piano keys and make melodies that are known only to them themselves, private little pockets of notes written nowhere and committed only to memories and lost as soon as they stop sighing in the air.
Circling each other, so close they could almost reach out and -