Chapter Text
Let’s imagine that Elias had gotten married young and taken a post in New York - if his brother can go halfway around the world in one direction, he’ll go halfway around the world in the other. So when Wen Yu and Jonah are killed, Jem is sent to family. To his aunt and uncle in New York instead of to London.
Jem, 12 years old and homesick and without Will to help balance him out, starts sneaking out of the Institute to go lurk around in New York’s (still barely getting started) Chinatown just because he wants to hear the language and be reminded of home. Then, sweets in hand from the shopkeeper who had noticed him and felt he needed some feeding, he walks back home through the park.
It is there that he meets Nate first. Nate with all his smug superiority. He was born in England after all and is properly civilized. He’s also the kind of poverty stricken white boy who needs to find someone lower than him in the social order to abuse. The Chinese kid is a good enough choice.
Nate follows him through the park, taunting and bullying and stealing the only baozi Jem has had in months. Jem could beat the hell out of him but he’s a mundane and Jem takes his status as a Shadowhunter seriously. He wouldn’t punch the mundane boy over something petty like a steamed bun. He wants to but he wouldn’t.
Tessa has no such issues. Her brother left her to read on a bench while he was off torturing the other kids and she comes to find him. Eleven years old with more empathy and heart than most people will ever have and when Nate doesn’t stop because she tells him to, she pushes him into the pond.
Her aunt is livid, “Nate was only playing. You’re a lady, Theresa, behave like it. Help me get him up.”
She might have felt guilty if the serious boy with the dark eyes wasn’t grinning at her. It’s hard to make friends with a boy when he’s a gentleman and you’re a poor girl and it is the 1870s but they manage it. Meeting in the park while her aunt is busy and her brother is distracted.
Jem starts letting secrets slip. She sees through glamour faster than any mundane he’s ever seen so he starts using it and sitting at her dining room table while her brother sleeps off a drunken night out.
They sneak down to Chinatown and Tessa uses her newly acquired, poorly pronounced Mandarin to order baozi that Jem pays for and the same clerk who gave him that free one once, drops some extra in the bag.
She takes him to New York landmarks and if they hold hands, she can share in his glamour and they can sneak into the Plaza and gawk at the riches.
She’s the first one to notice the strands of silver in his hair and so he tells her another secret and she doesn’t cry over it until she’s made it home to her own bed.
They’re getting old enough that it’s a scandal but his aunt and uncle run the Institute alone and don’t notice much and Tessa’s aunt needs her to run down to market or to drop off some of the sewing she took in so she can hardly keep Tessa supervised and in doors like a proper lady.
Her brother still leaves.
Her aunt still dies.
But this time there is someone to hold her hand at the funeral.
She still leaves for England.
Jem lasts two days after the boat sails before he goes to his uncle and requests to be transferred to an Institute in England. He says that it is about seeing where his father grew up before he dies. It is really about the idea of spending his last years without her. If he doesn’t follow her, he will never see her again and he can’t tolerate that thought.
Jem goes to say goodbye to the clerk who corrects Tessa’s pronunciation and always gave them extra snacks because the man is the only friend he has left in the city.
“You ask that little American girl to marry you this time,” he says when Jem admits where he’s going.
“She’s taller than you are,” Jem teases.
“I remember her when you two were this big,” he says holding his hand out over the floor though Jem was sure they were never that small, “You marry her and you invite me. I will cook a feast for you.”
Jem laughs and when he gets back to the Institute he reopens the trunk he had packed and digs to the bottom until he finds the jade pendant that had been his mother’s. Instead of leaving there with the other memories of his family, he carries it with him in his pocket when he leaves for London.
He tells himself that it is just for luck.