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It’s Clary who goes first, which is a surprise. The redhead was always so much more careful than her husband of ten years.
She’s only thirty-two, which is another surprise. Not that a Shadowhunter is dying before forty, but that it’s, again, Clary. Everyone thought she would at last get to forty, if not pass it.
Jace is broken. Not heartbroken, just straight-out broken. Completely unable to function without his self-admitted soulmate. It’s no place for their twins, so Isabelle and Simon take the little golden-haired girl and the redheaded boy with eyes eerily similar in color to Magnus’s in while their father slowly destroys himself.
Jace had talked about that with them, years ago. After that Mortal War… after Simon had been taken from them… Izzy had called them together and asked what they would do if the person they lo- “liked, a lot,” was taken from them.
Clary would try to keep living, even with the jagged wound where her heart had been, because Jace wouldn't want her to follow him. Not yet, and definitely not of her own volition. She would become her mother; keep fighting, build the best possible life for her kids, even if she herself was completely, utterly wrecked.
(They think it would have been better that Jace fulfilled all expectations and died first, because then the twins wouldn’t be orphans within a week of their mother's demise.)
Jace cares enough that he deliberately falls to a demon. There are two reasons for that: he doesn’t want to be like his mother, buried alone and in shame, never to be reunited with his loved one even in death and ashes. And two: he believes the twins will take it just a bit better if they hear that Jace Lightwood-Herondale died in a demon attack as opposed to them coming home to their invincible father, slumped on the floor of his and Clary’s bedroom, wrists wide open and leaking red all over the floor and himself.
He doesn’t want to damage them anymore than he has to.
And he does have to. Because he is just a bit too much like Valentine.
The woman he loves will alwaysalwaysalways come first, even over his own children.
He dies happy, even as poison-laced talons rip through his chest and tear out his lungs and heart; even as all his nerve endings burst to life with fiery agony, even as his soul seeps away.
I’ll see you soon, love.
He knows Clary will be disappointed, angry even, but she will understand. He told her this would happen years ago, on that couch in the Institute.
“What would you do, if Clary died?” Izzy asked.
The blonde looked at the love of his life, sitting attentively beside him on the sofa, and tried to imagine life with her gone from it. Permanently.
All he saw was gray mist and pain and hellfire curling around him, because life without Clary is hell.
“I would follow her,” he said without hesitation.
She sucked in a breath and hugged him fiercely, just the hint of a tremble running through her bones. He could feel her rabbitlike heartbeat against his chest and he smiled, reassured.
Clary was still there. She would be there a long time.
She knew he would follow her. They all knew.
Next is Magnus, which is so far out of the realm of expectation that the thought had never crossed a single mind. Magnus is immortal; Alec is supposed to leave him, not the other way around.
Alec locks himself in their apartment, puts every locking rune in the Book on the door and windows, and starts carving.
He doesn’t care if he’s buried in shame. He doesn't want to be buried with his parents anyway, and this is the only way to get to Magnus. (He will regret never being with Max, but Magnus- his husband of two decades- is worth more to him than the little brother he only knew for eleven years.
He’s going to go to Hell for that, but it’s the truth.)
His warlock had been cremated too, as specified. There was a plot set aside for the two in a mundane graveyard.
“Magnus… if you die, where will you go? What will happen to you?” Alec asked one night, shortly after his parabatai had ripped himself from their lives.
The warlock tapped his chin and gave an honest answer. “With you.”
The Shadowhunter allowed pain to flash over his face. “Mags… you know the Clave will never allow it.”
“No, no- not in the City of Bones, Alexander. In a normal graveyard.”
“You… want to have my ashes buried in a mundane graveyard?”
“Yes. That way, if I ever join you, we’ll be sure to be together.”
Alec smiled. “Sure. That's a great idea.”
Alec dies of a broken heart, because when you are in love with Magnus Magnificent Bane that is a real thing. (Technically he dies of combined blood loss and antidepressant pill overdose, but who the hell cares?)
His ashes are buried beside his husband of twenty years, and companion for forever.
Isabelle leaves next. Her children are twenty and eighteen and fifteen, and Clary and Jace’s twins twenty-four, and she is nearly fifty. They’ve moved out, except for James (who looks so much like Max Izzy had to fight tears every time she saw him from the time he was four to the time he was eleven).
She dies when a Eidolon turns into Alec and she freezes for the instant it needs to tear her apart.
It hurts like hell- like being Turned into a vampire, like how he imagines Jace felt when he was stabbed with Glorious- but Simon can deal with it. He loves Izzy, always has, but he and she… they aren’t as extreme in their love as the others. At least, he isn't.
He gave up his memories and his life once for her and all their friends-gone now, for decades. That’s enough.
She would have been strong enough too, he knows, if it were her alone now. She was always strong. She- and he too- would stay for the kids, because everyone but him is gone now and they need someone. They're too young.
“They’ve always been too young, Simon. God, but I don’t know what the hell Jace was thinking.”
“He was thinking that Clary meant more to him than anyone else; same as it’s been since we were seventeen and they loved each other even when they thought it was incest. He loved his kids, Izzy; but they can’t compete for Clary. Nothing can. They never had a chance.”
“When did you become the wise one of the family, Geek Boy?”
Simon sighs and stretch out in the too-large bed he and Izzy shared for three decades now. He’s a great Shadowhunter, he knows that, but he was never the best.
He doesn’t understand why he’s still here, and Izzy isn’t.
He doesn’t understand why he’s the only one left, when he was always the inferior one in their little group of incredible people.
Simon Lewis dies in a battle to defend his children in the Institute, attacked by a band of vampires who still remember him as the infamous Daylighter of his youth.
He is sixty-one, and he is ancient.
He goes peacefully, even as his throat is ripped open and his blood stains the walls of his home for the past several decades bright, indelible crimson.
He doesn’t have to be alone anymore, now.