Work Text:
He hadn't been there. Someone had to come and tell him what happened. His calm hadn't shifted as they spoke, as they made him a cup of tea, as they sat with him in the living room until he sent them away with a smile and a polite word. He sat back down once the door was shut and the room was empty. He sat and he didn't move. He slipped back into Silent Brother patterns that he had thought he had left behind.
He sat for a long time until he realized what he was doing.
He was waiting for her to get home because he needed someone to talk to.
He got up and went to bed.
She wasn't coming home.
The bed wasn't made. They usually at least pulled it straight but she had left in a rush and he hadn't come back in here to tidy. He looked at it. It looked the same as it had that morning when he'd gotten up. The pillow on her side was crumpled because she slept wrapped around it. The one on his side barely touched because he slept wrapped around her. The blankets were sky blue and bright white and they were half on the floor.
He lay down on her side where the sheets smelled of her soap and her hair and her skin and wrapped the blankets around himself. He hadn't cried and for a long time he thought maybe he wouldn't. Just the news was enough to break him so completely that he couldn't even cry. His eyes opened and he could see the bed table where her book sat. It had a scrap of paper tucked in just over halfway through. It probably a shopping list or a fragment of a spell she had been working on.
She wasn't going to finish the story. That would bother her, not to be able to finish the book. She finished every book she read, even the ones she hated. She wouldn't be able to finish this one. And that thought was the one that made the tears come.
Theresa Herondale-Carstairs was laid to rest under her full name in a ceremony attended by people from all corners of Downworld.
The warlocks from her days in the Magic Markets and the Spiral Labyrinth stood off to one side to talk of Tessa Gray and her work ethic and her ability to rearrange a problem until it made sense. They laughed more than the others but looked at the altar where she'd been lain out with emotions ranging from sadness to anger. Warlocks died rarely and though Tessa was young by their standards, she had been a part of a community. The ones who knew her had loved her.
Alec Lightwood leaned into Magnus's shoulder and asked who the little knot of warlocks that he had just left were. Magnus, who had been still and quiet and a little bit angry since he'd received the news, looked back at them and a sad smile tugged on his lips. He wore black with only a touch of flamboyance in the sparkling lapels.
"Tessa's strays," he said. Alec waited for the rest of the explanation. Magnus looked at him and that sad smile was back before he explained, "When she was young, Charlotte Fairchild took her in and gave her a place at the London Institute. This was back in the 1870s. A warlock girl without a home or family or prospects and in those days those things mattered but Charlotte kept her off the streets. In the years after she left the Clave, she paid that forward. Those are the ones I could find. The ones she gave shelter or got out of trouble or just befriended. Her little collection of stray cats. They're all mental and I think she genuinely loved each of them."
A vampire wearing a very old-fashioned suit was one of the few who called her Tess Herondale. He told a Shadowhunter woman with very red hair that he was Mrs. Herondale's accountant and rambled for a little bit about how her substantial assets would be held in trust and then distributed among her family members. It was a long list of people and places that would receive donations and bursaries and gifts for their children.
A faerie laughed when asked how she had known Tessa and replied that truly it had been her mother that she had known, "I only met the girl once at a party. I think she spent most of it kissing a boy but if you'd seen the boy, you wouldn't've turned down the chance either." She'd spun off, a bright spot of gauzy purple fabric against the black and white of the funeral.
The Shadowhunters stood in their own knot. Jace spun the Herondale ring on his finger and adjusted the white suit he wore over and over. Jace had no family but Tessa and he'd only begun to get to know her. Clary stood with her mother because Jocelyn had known Tessa longer than the rest of them. Simon and Isabelle stood knotted together and the Blackthorns held their own council.
Her husband stood alone though the others swirled by him. The Downworlders in the gray and black of mundane funerals and the Shadowhunters in their whites all moved around him. They said the things you say at funerals and he gave the proper answers but he had retreated far behind a solid mask of utter calm. Those who had known him before he'd regained his humanity found themselves slipping back into calling him Zachariah instead of Jem.
He stood alone and he watched her.
She was laid out like a Shadowhunter on a pyre though they were as far from the Silent City as he had been able to arrange. She wore white but the runes on the gown were picked out in green and gold not red. She was never entirely a Shadowhunter in life and he had wanted her to carry her full identity with her. There were runes drawn on her skin. Drawn in paint not with a stele but there. The marriage runes where they were meant to be.
She had worn a bracelet and a necklace in their place her entire life. Jem held these in his hand. He had debated whether to leave them with her or keep them and in the end he'd been unable to let go of them. It had been impossible to add them the pile of things that she would wear. He didn't know why. They were hers and should have stayed with her but he couldn't unclench his fingers and put them down.
He listened and he'd heard someone say, "She had a long life, that's a good thing isn't it?"
"She's had lifetimes to live but she was just starting this one," Magnus had told them.
He had stopped listening after that.
Things were said. People who had known her said things. Ceremonies were spoken. He didn't speak. He barely heard them. He played a piece of music that was heartwrenchingly sad and left him with tears in his eyes. She had always understood his music and now there was no one to translate the notes into words. He knew and hoped that somewhere out there she would hear the music and know which melodies spoke of yearly meetings with too much space in between and which spoke of kisses by the edge of the water and which spoke of Sunday afternoons with tea and books and which spoke of missing pieces and shared loss.
As the music faded the assembled warlocks sent up a salute in coloured sparks against the darkening sky and then left before the pyre was lit.
Once the ceremonies began he didn't say a word until the end when he whispered, "Ave atque vale," along with the others.
He said it one more time, when he'd been given the space to whisper only to her, "Atque in pepetuum, Tess, ave atque vale. Wo ai ni. I have always loved you," before the flames were lit.
In the Silent City, he picked through the graves without pausing to check where he was going. He was still wearing mourning whites when he went that time. He sat in front of the plaque with the Herondale name engraved on it. He sat on the ground and played with a dagger in his fingers. He started to speak many times but words failed each time.
Finally he pointed the dagger at the plaque and said, "I was supposed to watch over her. I was meant to protect her. All I ever did for my entire life was try to keep her safe. I couldn't. I wasn't even there. She's gone to wherever it is that you are now and you need to do better than I did. Keep her safe, William. Please."
For a long time he just sat there.
"I could never see you the way that she could but I hope you'll wait for me," he said.
The air in front of him shimmered. It was just the tiniest of impressions. Disapproval and heartache. Jem frowned at it as it disappeared again. The message was surprisingly clear for a figment of his imagination.
"That is not what I meant. I don't know how to live without her but I don't know how to live without you either and I've survived that so far. I just want you to be there when I get there. I will get there eventually. She'd never forgive me if I rushed it," he said.
The shimmer did not return but a feeling washed through him. Warm and hopeful and deeply sad. Jem closed his eyes and cried for the first time since he'd collapsed into the bed they had shared. When it passed, he wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt and sat up with his feet crossed like a student before a teacher.
"I will not have her buried here," he told the place where the shimmer had been, "I know that she would have been happy to be where you are but this place," he looked around and the monuments and the tombs and the stretching, aching silence of it all and sighed, "I won't have her here. I will be taking her to that place you had in Wales, the little cabin where she keeps all her memories and her photos. That is where she will be. If it matters to the dead, if you need to know, that's where she'll be. I'll see you, Will, eventually."
In January he went to the bridge and he laid out her necklace and the bracelet on the stone. He had run his hands over her books. He had read the end of the one she hadn't been able to finish. He had played the pieces of their too brief time together in music. He had looked through every picture he had of her. He had gone to the places where they had been together and he'd forced himself to go to places he had never seen before. He had not talked to her or even much about her.
Now he opened those gates and he talked.
"I miss you," he said with his eyes shut. There was so much of her in his memories here that he could imagine her in jeans and running shoes or a dress that brushed the tops of stylish leather boots. He could imagine her in denim or lace. In bright colours and muted tones. He could remember her voice, her arsenal of smiles that all meant something slightly different, the way she talked with her hands when she got truly passionate about something and forgot that ladies didn't gesture like that.
He talked with his eyes shut while decades of London and her ran through his memories. He talked for a long time. Longer than the hour they'd always allowed themselves. If anyone noticed the man talking to a necklace on a bridge as night fell, well, it was London and stranger things had happened.
"I hope you found him. Whatever is out there beyond this, whatever comes next on the wheel of life, I hope you found him. I hope you aren't alone," he said.
Yearly, as he had for most of his existence, he went to that bridge and had that conversation. He saved up a years worth of things to say to her and then told her everything. He told her of Blackthorn children and Herondale weddings. He told her about technology he loved and technology he hated. He told her about movies he had seen and finally learning to play the qin. He told her about growing older. He told her about Herondale children and Lightwoods who kept trying to change the Clave from within. He told her about being lonely.
He told her about the places he'd seen. He told her about checking in on her stray warlocks and what they were up to. He told her about the rare new friends he made and why he thought she would like them. One year, he told her about the little girl who had lost her parents to some new disaster and how he hadn't been able to leave her to be raised in an Institute like so many Shadowhunter orphans. He told her of the girl's trials and her successes with pride in his voice. He told her of reading the words, “first dream of my soul,” at the wedding of a girl who kept the Carstairs name though she hadn’t been born to it.
As the years went by, he smiled more and laughed more easily. He never quite found the radiant joy of having Tessa laugh while she pressed her face against his neck but the little boy who called him Waigong was an entirely different kind of joy.
He found himself adopted into families he hadn't ever expected to have. Emma's granddaughter came to him to learn the violin. Jace's son reminded him so much of James Herondale that sometimes he had to catch himself before he used the wrong name. When a pair of children with Isabelle's eyes and Simon's hair got into a screaming match in his living room he'd laughed because they reminded him of Lucie's sons so many years before. The children all thought he was being silly when he told them that he was older than cars and that his hair was really turning gray for the second time.
At a family reunion held at the farm house that had once been Luke Graymark's, Magnus came to sit beside him looking just as he always had. Jem was over 200 years old and liked to make jokes that he was finally feeling like his age had caught up to him. He was still tall and thin and straight backed though he was frailer than he had been in centuries.
"Do you ever regret that you didn't move on?" Magnus asked in the course of the conversation.
"I did move on. There was never anyone else that I loved like I love her. There never could be but I've found a life. I've found people to love and who have returned that love. There isn't more I could need," Jem said.
"She would have loved this," Magnus said waving a hand at the assembled mix of Shadowhunters and the Downworlders who made up their friends and families.
"Yes, she would," Jem said smiling fondly and only a little sadly out at the crowd.
He had filed the story about the reunion away to tell her at the next meeting on the bridge. He didn't make it. Just before Christmas the year of his 84th birthday, his lungs started failing. Age and the damage they suffered when he was a dying child finally caught up to him. He died as Will had died, surrounded by a family made up of more than blood relations.
That there was no one to hold his hand in his final moments or to play his life story in music or words mattered less than it might have.
She sat on a wall though there was nothing in that place and he leaned beside her. They waited. They were not always here at the edge of death’s kingdom where you could lose yourself in the abyss but today they’d made their way back. Today they waited.
She broke away first to fling herself into his arms. Jem pulled her in and closed his eyes. Home. A laugh and another arm around his shoulder while she half cried and half laughed with her face against his neck. He had made his way home.
“What comes next?” he asked.
“Let’s find out,” Will said.