Chapter Text
The sun had risen and Tessa was sitting out on the back porch, watching the road. Jem came to lean on the rail next to her. She sat up on the rail with her skirt tucked in under her to keep it from flapping in the breeze. It was a posture that made her look very young. Curls had escaped and were fluttering around her face. Jem had known that she was pretty but something about her in that moment, stopped his thoughts.
He stared at her for longer than was strictly polite before he came to lean against the rail beside her.
“You’re worrying about him,” Jem said.
“I hate it when he’s late.”
“Would you ask him to take the desk job? To sit in the office in the Inquistor’s tower and fill in paperwork all day?”
She gave a half smile, “He’d wither. Like a plant in a dark room. If he were the type of person to choose that, he wouldn’t be my Will.”
Jem smiled at her for saying it.
“You and I could make safer choices too.”
“I’d always planned to spend my life on a battlefield,” Jem said with a shrug. “I never wanted safe.”
“I thought I did,” Tessa said. “When I was younger, I would imagine a perfect life where everything was effortless and pristine. Ball gowns and leather bound books and fine food. Neat and tidy. Easy. Effortless. A princess’s life. I thought I wanted perfect and perfect was everything I didn’t have.”
“Ball gowns and fine food don’t sound terrible,” Jem said.
“It’s boring. A husband you see twice a week, a lovely house to clean and fuss over, teas and luncheons with people who are just delighted to have a Herondale on the guest list. It was tedious.”
“What changed?”
Tessa laughed and told him a story that started about two years after the wedding. They had been living a life far closer to what Jem had imagined Will’s marriage would be like. Will had spent all his time throwing himself into work while she sat around at home and enjoyed the famous name, invitations, and budget. Their lives were two circles that barely intersected. Two separate worlds. Jem could hear the echo of Will’s quiet unhappiness in the way she talked about her own quiet unhappiness.
“Of course, I’d started at screaming misery so quiet unhappiness felt like joy to me.”
“It breaks my heart that you can laugh at that like it’s a joke,” Jem said.
She reached out and grabbed his arm and gave it a little hug. She stayed like that, her head on his shoulder as she went back to her story. It had been a bad night and Jem took the comfort without letting his thoughts dwell on it too much.
Her magic had built up slowly like water building behind a dam. It hadn’t bothered her when she was young. She had never shown any aptitude or skill set for magic when she’d tried to work spells hidden away from the world in the York Institute’s attic. Jem tried to picture her as a little girl as she told the story. It was hard to imagine her without the poise and confidence of Mrs. Theresa Herondale. He could picture her small and determined but she mentioned being terrified and that was harder to picture.
“What were you scared of?” Jem asked.
“That they would cut off my head and put it on the wall,” she said.
He stopped and leaned back to look at her. She had said it so simply but he knew it wasn’t a joke. She didn’t look up at him, she kept talking softly, “The York Institute has a spoils room that goes back centuries. I think there are relics in there from the 1400s. One of them is a tiny warlock skull with little horns. A child’s. Maybe six or seven years old. You know that age when a kid is missing their front teeth? That skull is missing its front teeth. That’s what I was scared of. My great-grandfather had no trouble cutting the heads off of children if those children were downworlders. He didn’t know that I was and I lived in fear of him finding out.”
“Tessa.”
There wasn’t anything else to say about it. She hugged his arm again.
“That’s why you keep it a secret?”
“I don’t think most of the people I know would cut my head off,” she said. “But it would change the way they saw me. You’ve met Will’s father. He would not be happy to learn that I have warlock blood in my veins. Linette would be terrified. Truly scared of me. I don’t think they’d kill me but they wouldn’t welcome me with open arms.”
“Will did.”
She smiled. “I didn’t think he would. I couldn’t imagine that he would. I knew he had Downworld friends but to go to a party with a Downworlder is different from having one in your house. It took me a long time to move beyond my own fear of Downworlders. I knew what I was but I was still scared of them. I’d been raised to be scared of them. To think of them as them, as other, as dangerous. I was scared of myself. I was scared of everyone else. There was a lot of fear. Let’s be honest.”
Jem squeezed her hand. She had made some disparaging comments about her family but this was the first time she’d laid it out so clearly. She painted a picture of a terrifying childhood. There was no going back. You could not undo a piece of any childhood but Jem had never wanted to try so badly. His parents’ deaths could not be undone but neither could his mother passing him pieces of mango on a summer afternoon or his father’s violin music drifting through the house.
Did her childhood have moments like that?
“You deserve to be loved,” Jem said because he couldn’t ask the question.
“My mother loved me, she died a long time ago but I know she loved me. I don’t mean to make it sound so tragic. I’m not looking for sympathy. The story doesn’t make sense if you don’t understand why I expected him to hate me. He’s Will. Hate doesn’t come easily for him. Anger does but not hate. Still. I was braced for hate. I had seen so much of it.”
“I can’t imagine him hating you. I can barely imagine him avoiding you.”
“We got on alright. We were friends and then the magic started.”
“Just like that? All at once?”
Tessa nodded. She explained quietly that she was a shapeshifter, that the magic had lain dormant for so long because it was rooted deep in her bones. She spoke of reaching into people and finding the little spark of something that she could pull into herself to create a change. Jem tried to imagine it, reaching out and touching someone’s soul. It seemed unbearably intimate to him but she explained it mechanically. A series of steps to complete a task.
“It didn’t start that easily of course. I didn’t even understand the problem. It wasn’t a specific sensation. It was more like malaise. I felt heavy and jittery and irritable. There was something inside me clamouring to get out but I didn’t know that yet.”
She hid it, ignored it, and pushed it down until she finally collapsed. Will had found in her the middle of something like a seizure and he’d called on a warlock friend instead of a Silent Brother. Tessa had woken in her bed with a stranger looming over her while Will sat in a chair beside her bed with a serious look on his face.
“’ That is quite the magic you’re carrying,’ that’s what he said. I was too tired to let it show but I was terrified. Will was just sitting there, making that face he has where his eyebrows are drawn together and he’s trying to solve the problems of the universe by thinking about them hard enough.”
“I know that look.”
“I expected him to order me out.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Jem said.
“No, he wouldn’t. He didn’t. He just let it go for a long time. In my memory, it was a long time, as I waited for the other shoe to drop. Then one day I was sitting there at breakfast and my fingers were shaking. Not badly, a little tremour and he looks over and asks me if I’ve ever considered training. Was I curious about it? I was. Desperately. Of course, I was. He made a few introductions and his friends closed ranks around me in a way I’d never imagined was even possible.
“This is going to make you look at me like that again but it’s true. I had never had friends. Not like that. People who would sit with me through a problem, who judged me on my actions, not my family. People who stayed. They helped me figure out the shape of my powers a little bit at a time and when I was too tired or too stressed, it stopped. No one pushed me to write just one more rune or demanded I try again.”
“That you find that surprising might be more horrifying than the stories of the spoils room.”
“It was in the course of all that, that Will had I got to know each other. It was in the corners of a party at Magnus Bane’s townhouse that we realized how similar our senses of humour were. He would stand by my side and step in when he thought I was being treated unfairly. He had tried - for a while - to make a habit of going back up to York to visit my Great-Grandfather. I think he meant it as a kindness so I wouldn’t feel homesick. I went. I didn’t want to make a scene. That stopped almost immediately once he’d put the pieces together. I started turning around and expecting him to be there. I started reaching for him when I was upset. I came to him to show him some triumph or share something funny I’d heard. I fell in love before I knew that was what it was.”
Jem smiled at that. They were still watching the road and they could see one of the buses rolling up the dirt. She smoothed her hair back and straightened up. He missed the warmth of her against his side as she swung around to slide off the rail. Jem trailed after her wanting to push for more details but she was headed towards the laneway.
“It is nearly nine in the morning, which means that it was the Clave Officials coming up from the city to look over the battlefield that kept him. We’d have heard if it was a disaster. It was politics and he’s going to be in a mood,” Tessa said.
“He’s good at politics.”
“Doesn’t mean he likes it. He’s going to be grumpy as hell.”
“I know,” Jem said. “Do you think he’ll get annoyed at us for arranging his day for him like he’s a child arriving home from school?”
“Possibly but if it gets him out of talking to his father, he’ll forgive us very quickly enough.”
The wagon rolled up and Will leaned out the back door to smile at everyone like he was a cheery conductor on a tour. He didn’t look like he was in a foul mood but that probably just meant that he was still wearing the politician’s mask. A few other nurses were waiting for the bus and Tessa got on with them.
She stopped on the tailgate to lean in close to her husband. Will kissed her and she whispered something in his ear and he glanced back at Jem. She gave him a little shove and then ducked under his arm and into the bus after the other women. Will glanced back at her and the driver started the horses up. They started to trundle away and Will hesitated one more moment before jumping down off the moving vehicle.
He walked back up the road towards Jem.
“Am I being banished or summoned? I can’t tell.”
“Summoned,” Jem said with a half smile. ‘’I suspect she’s happy to have a break from you now and then though. She says you had a political meeting on the battlefield this morning.”
“I am being banished,” Will said. “She’s convinced you that you want me but you don’t. I got to stand beside a Whitelaw in a silk suit on the site where a traveling demon had burst out of a still-twitching body only a few hours before. There was still gore on the ground and they wanted to talk of metaphysics. How does a demon possessing a body compel the limbs to move? Is it an action of controlling the brain or of contracting each muscle independently? How long can one discuss the mechanics of muscle movement? Too long.”
“We had one of the twitchy ones here tonight. The demon climbed out, looked me in the eye, and threatened me.”
“It got off the battlefield?”
“Yeah.”
Will swore creatively and stretched. Jem had started the night lying in bed imagining cuddling and running his fingers through Will’s hair. The reality of Will - grumpy and stressed and tired - eating a bowl of stew on the back deck of the hospital was less cozy and less romantic. He talked his way through the worst of his day and Jem shared an anecdote here or there.
“Do you know how much I missed you?” Will said in the middle of the conversation.
“Almost as much as I missed you,” Jem said.
“More.”
“Not possible.”
Will smiled at him and it was softer and less aggravated than any other expression since he’d hopped onto the ground. Still wearing gear, pale and tired in the morning sun, he was still the most beautiful person Jem knew. When he smiled like that, Jem would do anything for him.
“I love you,” Jem said.
“Rookie mistake,” Will said.
“I love you, even when you say things like that,” Jem said.
There was no one else out here at this time of day and it felt good to say the words out in the open.
“I love you too. Now let’s go inside before I fall asleep with my face in this soup bowl, I’ll get bits of carrot in my hair.”
“Can’t have that,” Jem said.
He stood and stretched out a hand. Will took it and didn’t let go as they headed up to the farm house and Jem’s tiny little apartment.
Will had been exhausted and while food and conversation had taken the edge off his irritability, he had not been fit for anything but collapsing into bed the night before. Jem had summoned him with other intentions but he found himself slipping back into the easy domestic pattern of having someone else there as he got ready for bed.
Will and his horrible habit of shedding clothing as he walked through a room. Will washing his face and cleaning his teeth. Will sitting down on the edge of the bed like he belonged there.
“If I fall asleep right here, like this, will you forgive me?” Will asked.
“Lie down, I’ll forgive you falling asleep if you make some space for me.”
“You weren’t hoping for a romantic evening?”
Jem crawled into Will’s lap and settled, straddling his hips. Will leaned back a little and smiled. He really did look tired. Jem traced the shape of his face, the line of his nose, the shape of his jaw, and the purple shadows under his eyes. Will watched him do it.
“I was hoping for something else but this, just having you here, is more than enough.”
“Good.”
Will wrapped his arms around Jem’s waist and pulled him down into bed. It would have been a very good start for something else but it ended with Jem flat on his back and Will’s head on his chest. He sighed and let himself relax. A bit at a time. Slowly but surely. This felt like home and he let himself settle into it.
Will’s hair was tangled and Jem carefully teased out the knots in the curls. Will’s breathing was evening out and he was asleep almost as soon as he stopped moving. Jem lay awake awhile longer, just enjoying the steady rhythm of his breathing before sleep claimed him as well.