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The hotel room was a disaster. He didn’t have much luggage. He didn’t know how to shop in mundane stores and so the few clothes he did have didn’t fit the way he thought they should. His jeans were too tight. His shirt was too loose. He felt like a child trying to dress up as something they’d never seen.
The black shirt fit better than anything else but when he looked at himself in the mirror he saw gear. He could not go to this wearing something that reminded him of fighting and dying and children who had to kill their parents to survive. He yanked the shirt off over his head and threw it at the table. It was not alone in the pile beside his partially eaten breakfast.
Jem Carstairs hadn’t had to pick an outfit in a very long time. He’d never had to prepare for a first impression quite as important as this one. He didn’t want to look like a warrior come from the trenches though he still felt a little like one. He wanted her to look at him and see what he had always seen in her.
He wanted her to look at him and see home.
He abandoned the problem of his shirt and leaned in to look at his hair in the mirror. It was sticking up again and the silver piece was shockingly bright against the the mess of dark brown. He ran his fingers through it and shook his head in hopes that it would fall flat. It didn’t quite work.
In the mirror he caught sight of the rune on his shoulder. Nearly everything else had faded to white. The runes from his training as a Shadowhunter had faded after he’d joined the brothers and now most of the Brotherhood’s runes had faded to white as well. A few lingered black and harsh against his skin. They were permanent reminders of what he had been. This one was neither black nor white. The shape of it was picked out in gray.
He sat down on the bed and inhaled. The flutter of strong emotion in his chest didn’t fade so he did it again and again until it calmed. He couldn’t always predict the emotions that would come and it had been so long without them that he couldn’t quite remember what anger or grief or loneliness felt like until they were roaring through him erasing everything in their path.
With his back resolutely to the mirror, he checked the time. Early. Still so early. He itched to go find her. She had a home somewhere in London. He could go there before she even left for the bridge. He wanted to see her. More than a century and he hadn’t seen her with his own eyes in all that time.
He argued with himself that he was silly for waiting but he couldn’t just show up on her doorstep. It wouldn’t be proper. It would be too much of a shock. It would be too much of an intrusion. She had a life and this day was the only one of the year when he had any claim to her time. He would see her this afternoon. He would sit beside her and look at her and remember all the details time had washed away and the Brotherhood had prevented him from truly seeing through his sealed eyes.
That would be enough.
Just to see her once would be enough.
He told himself over and over that it would be enough.
The little place in the back of his mind that kept trying to pull up the exact memory of what her hair felt like between his fingers kept telling him he was lying. Her lips had a taste and he couldn’t remember it. Her eyes were not always the same colour. She was beautiful and he could have stared at her for days. But, said some buried part of himself, but it wouldn’t be enough.
He put a blue sweater on. It was almost the right colour. Not quite gray enough to be the colour of her eyes but almost. If he covered the runes on his face with his hands and swept the silver hair under all the brown he looked almost like the man he might have grown into if the world had been different.
“Jem Carstairs,” he told his reflection.
Not Brother Zachariah as he had been for so long but Jem Carstairs.
Jem Carstairs had someone he needed to see.
He let his hair fall back into place, the silver right over his forehead. He looked at the runes on his cheeks and the scars on his hands. None of it could be changed. He drew himself up to full height and looked his reflection in the eye. She’d called him beautiful when he’d been dying. She’d called him a miracle when he’d left his humanity behind. She was not someone he needed to hide from.
It was still too early but Jem smiled at himself and ran the things he wanted to say to Tessa one more time before he went to his favourite place in London for a long overdue meeting with his future.