Archive of Our Own ^beta

O brother taken from unhappy me! O delightful light taken from an unhappy brother! Together with you is buried all our house, together with you have perished all our joys, which your sweet love nurtured during life.

— Catullus, from whom came Ave atque vale

Thomas Lightwood did not expect to break down upon seeing his mother’s face.

She was standing beneath the rising archway of the cathedral at Westminster Abbey, seraph blade glittering in one hand like a splintered pearl and watching with tired eyes as masses of Shadowhunters all around staggered to their feet, helped each other up, leant over one another with steles, grit their teeth and looked out across the Thames. Gabriel Lightwood was with her, his head bowed, and Sophie murmured something to him before turning to Thomas and extending an arm.

“Thomas, sweetheart. Over here.”

Thomas began to run.

Before he realised what had happened, he was leaning against her, all six feet and five inches of his body tucked into her arms, his forehead pressed against her collarbone. Warm breath and warmer words washed over his ear, and he choked back a strangled sob.

“Oh, my darling, it's alright,” Sophie said. “Everyone’s okay. You’re okay.” She said it only in a whisper, cupping the back of his head and threading her weathered fingers into his hair.

“It’s — Kit — what have you —”

“We’ve waited for you all to arrive in Idris. Eugenia had to do quite a bit of shouting, but she’s managed to convince them you should all be there for it.” She pressed her lips to the crown of his head, and he felt four years old, tiny in her arms and so very scared of the world outside, hiding behind the legs of his brave older sisters. He could feel her cheek pressed against his hair, rougher on one side than the other; as familiar to him as the palms of his own hands, or the crevices between his fingers. 

More of them had begun to stagger out of the abbey, and Thomas could see Anna and Ari limping towards them, arms looped around each other and keeping one another up. Anna’s vest was torn and murky with blood, and Ari’s hair a tangled mess spilling down one shoulder. She had a cut across her bottom lip, and blood was smudged across her chin, like someone else had tried to sweep it gently away with their thumb. Ari was smiling tiredly, and Anna was looking at her the way the faces of flowers turned towards the sun.

Anna finally let go of Ari as she dashed towards her father, moving faster and faster, and Gabriel held a longsword in one hand, but Thomas still saw the moment it fell to the ground as his uncle’s face cracked in two. He rushed over and swept her up in a hug so tight she was lifted straight off her feet, and they spun in a circle, Gabriel crushing his child to his chest and clutching the back of her head with his hand, tucking his face into her shoulder. His fingers were shaking, and so were Anna’s hands, white-knuckled against her father’s back even when he set her down. She did not let go.

Gabriel opened his eyes over Anna’s shoulder.

“Ariadne?” His voice was gravel.

“Ari,” Anna whispered to him against his chest.

“Ari? Are you okay?” Gabriel said. He straightened, keeping one hand on Anna’s back. Thomas watched her take out her stele and begin to draw healing runes on his arm. “Do either of you need iratzes?”

Anna smiled tiredly while she worked. “We’re okay, Papa. But thank you.”

“Alastair and Thomas sorted us out,” Ari said.

Gabriel’s bright eyes settled then on Thomas, and it was as if suddenly there were no words at all to say. As if the air itself had disappeared. A thousand unspoken things passed through the space between them as they watched each other, floating away uselessly on the wind. Gabriel simply gazed at him, unable to speak, his mouth crooked like the smile he’d aimed for had slipped away halfway through.

“Well,” he said thickly, after the moment had long stretched out, “I am so very glad that you were there, Tom.” 

Thomas could do nothing but swallow and nod dumbly, new grief blooming fresh like a wound. 

“Where's Mama?” Anna said, clearly exhausted. Ari had come to stand by her, and Anna took her hand immediately. Behind them, Thomas' eyes fell onto Eugenia making her way toward the rest of them.

“She is still in Idris with Alexander,” Gabriel said. “We… the Consul hoped you would all come to be there.”

“Now that you are no longer deliberately all trapped in here by yourselves, of course,” Sophie said, brushing the sweaty hair back from Thomas's face and placing the gentlest of kisses at his temple.

“Eugenia!” someone shouted hoarsely. “Thomas!” They all turned to look as Gideon Lightwood staggered desperately towards them, clambering up the rubble littering the entryway, stopping beside his brother and grabbing at Gabriel’s shoulder almost unconsciously. His eyes were huge and hollow, and when Thomas met his gaze they began to fill with tears.

“Thomas—” he gasped, eyes flicking between his two children, to Anna, to Ari, to Sophie, to Gabriel. “Eugenia — Thomas —”

“Oh, Papa, we’re all right,” Eugenia said kindly, taking a step closer to the rest of her family.

“Come here, my love,” Sophie said, and Gideon grit his teeth and marched towards her, touching his forehead to hers and closing his eyes. His breathing was ragged. Behind him, his brother watched on, and the look in his eyes was that of hardened stone.

Thomas watched his mother kiss his father on the forehead, the way she had done to him. He watched Gideon’s shoulders loosen, his breathing become more steady. He watched his mother smile.

“They really waited for us?” Thomas asked quietly. 

Eugenia leant into his side, nudging his arm. It was strange, how in every bit of madness and ruin, and even when he was a full foot taller than her, his sister still made him feel safe. 

“Don’t worry, Tommie. I wouldn’t let them budge one inch. I told Aunt Charlotte I’d challenge her for the Consul position if she even considered it,” she said.

Gabriel was gazing out at the destruction that lay all around them, the injured bodies, the rubble and debris strewn along the ground. Shadowhunters tending to each others’ wounds with iratzes, cleaning weapons, sheathing their seraph blades with harsh faces as they made their way down the steps of the abbey. His expression was bleak as he turned to face them.

“Surely some of us should stay to help clean up this mess — we are part of the London Enclave, we can’t merely slip away like —”

“Gabriel,” Sophie said softly, moving toward him and squeezing his hand gently in hers, “there are others who are here to handle things, and who will gladly do so. You are returning to Idris, and you will be there with Cecily, and you will be there for your son’s funeral.”

Thomas had to look away from the way his uncle’s face collapsed in on itself. There was something terribly wrong with watching adults he’d looked up to all his life shatter before his eyes.

He looked back instead, and could see James limping slowly over to them, his father following at his side and clearly chastising him. Cordelia was somewhere further behind, her hands clasped in her brother’s.

Her indescribable brother’s. Thomas wanted to go to him, wanted to leave him be, wanted to brush the tousled hair from his face.

“Eugenia.” It was James, still swaying a little on his feet and touching absently at the marriage rune on his wrist. “Do you know where Lucie and Jesse are?”

Eugenia shook her head and told him no, she did not, but she thought they might still be closer to one of the other entrances to the abbey, and James set off after grasping Thomas’s shoulder and squeezing it gently. 

Thomas did not miss the way his father looked up when James spoke, or the way he studied them all after James left, or the way he and his brother looked back at each other, wearing twin unreadable expressions. 

They used the old Portal, Henry’s Portal, in the belly of the Institute. The communication lines to London were reestablished, and Downworld had woken up again, but Shadowhunters kept to their own as it was, and the little group that had stayed behind in Belial’s London had adamantly banned anyone from asking anything of any Downworlders in the near future. Not one of the rest of the Clave had seen what they had seen.

Thomas had hung back in the Institute basement, wanting to depart with his family, but he had smiled grimly when Alastair looked back at him from the glow of the Portal. He had one hand on Cordelia’s shoulder, and she was holding James’ hand so tightly it looked as though it probably hurt; she had been since she’d woken him with Cortana. James was holding hers just as tightly back. And despite how utterly weary he was, and the lines of grief still constant around his eyes, Thomas had not seen James look as light as he did in a very, very long time.

“I will see you there, Thomas,” Alastair had said after the battle, when hordes of them had begun the walk back to the Institute, a bizarre procession not unlike the one that had taken them all to Belial’s Portal in the first place.

Thomas had drawn Alastair’s hand to his mouth and brushed his lips lightly against Alastair’s knuckles. “Please give your mother my best.”

Alastair smiled, and ran his fingers over Thomas’s hand, sweeping his thumb across the inner part of Thomas’s wrist. “She will be glad for it. She likes you.”

There were only a few of them left to enter the Portal now; everyone else was either remaining at their own houses in London or resting in the infirmary, now that the Silent Brothers were able to travel and administer medicine and runes. Thomas had not yet seen Brother Zachariah, and suspected that he had volunteered to remain with the other Silent Brothers in Idris for more than one reason.

He and Anna stood side by side, watching the rest of the Herondales go through. Lucie smiled back at them as she stepped into the Portal, but Jesse did not look back, his head bowed instead. Thomas knew his father was watching Jesse again, watching him very intently, and he had the feeling that Jesse might know it, too.

“We must brave the world now, Tom,” Anna said then, joining their arms at the elbow and marching forward. Thomas glanced to the left, to where their fathers stood side by side, one broad, one angular; a mirror of their children, though not the mirror they had all become used to. He swallowed, then stepped forward, to Alicante.

Only a couple of hours after they had made it to Idris, a sharp knock at the door sounded from the front of the Herondale house.

It was left to Jesse to answer. James was with Cordelia, visiting her mother and the baby; Will and Tessa were over at the Gard speaking with Charlotte Fairchild, and Lucie, his Lucie, had fallen asleep lying atop a daybed in the pale sunlight, where she’d been scratching down ideas in her notebook. He’d tucked the hair out of her face, run his fingers through it delicately so he wouldn’t wake her, and then gone to open the door. 

The person on the other side was Gideon Lightwood.

“Oh,” Jesse said intelligently. “Uncle Gideon.” And though he tried to steady himself, he could feel all of his defences going up, and shame coiling itself around his throat.

The sight of either of his uncles caused a web so tangled to rise in Jesse’s mind that he still could not even begin to try and take it apart. They made him feel ten years old, scared, hidden, hopeful, guilty. Paralysed. He felt pulled every which way by all the threads his mother had sewn into him.

“Would you like me to fetch Lucie to take a message? I think Will and Tessa are still down at the Gard, but —”

“Actually, I, ah — was hoping to speak to you,” Gideon said in a strained voice. He seemed rather alarmed, standing very straight, his eyes wide as they looked at each other awkwardly. 

They had spoken only one other time in Jesse’s life. Then, he remembered a man, larger than life, terrifying, filling up the whole doorway, kneeling down to his level and reaching out a hand that Jesse had recoiled from, stunned with fear. He could hear it still; gentle words, not pressing, not loud, not forceful. Just words, there if he needed them.

You are one of us.

Now, they were of near equal height, and yet he still could not quite bear to look his uncle in the eye. 

Gideon held his hat in front of his body and fiddled with the brim of it. “Jesse,” he said, “I understand that — that you are staying with the Herondales, and I do not wish to part you from James or Lucie, but we — that is, your Uncle Gabriel and I — would very much like it if we could speak with you, at our house.”

Jesse had never met his Uncle Gabriel. But the thought most immediately preoccupying his mind was that his mother had killed Gabriel’s son.

“Are you sure you wish to have me there?” he asked hesitantly.

Gideon Lightwood was silent for a long time. A muscle twitched in his jaw, and his eyes were slightly narrowed as he peered at the floor. They were not the same shade of green that Jesse’s were. Lightwood green, not Blackthorn green. 

“You are close with your sister, are you not?” Gideon asked finally. 

There was no longer an easy answer to that question, but Jesse nodded.

“You can imagine it then, watching her become that. Watching her fall.” His complicated gaze rose to rest again on Jesse’s face. “I will never be able to reconcile my feelings about my sister. She will always be a blot in my thoughts. And she is a cruel, cruel woman, who treated those around her as if they were expendable, but it has all stemmed from the fault of our father, and that is something I have sat with for twenty-five years.”

Jesse’s heart had started beating very loudly in his ears, the sensation even more frightening when it was still a novelty to him. My sister became warped and I felt helpless. I will never be able to reconcile my feelings about her. It is the fault of the person who raised us.

“I have lost my daughter,” Gideon said steadily, “and I have lost my nephew. There is nothing that could make me want to keep away from any one of the rest of you.”

Jesse placed a hand on the doorframe to steady himself and noticed that it was faintly trembling. He looked back, half-over his shoulder at the hallway opening up opposite him, to where Lucie Herondale waited for him, asleep though she may be. He heard Gideon move behind him.

“I do not want to overwhelm you any more than I already have. I am — I do not want you to feel the way you felt in that house. I do not wish you to feel like you cannot turn to family.”

Jesse looked a moment longer and then turned back to face his uncle.

“Allow me one moment to leave the Herondales a note.”

He returned momentarily, taking a long coat carefully from one of the hooks by the door and stepping out into the brisk air. Gideon turned to walk with him, donning his hat once more.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, the crunch of dislodged rock from well-worn paths underneath their boots. Jesse tried not to stare too much. In all the years he had lived in Idris, he had never before been to Alicante. Small houses lined either side of the street, and there appeared to be bridges seemingly everywhere you looked. Gideon took very lengthy, decisive strides as he walked, but Jesse was long and limber, so he easily matched pace.

“I should have put a stop to it,” Gideon said very suddenly, his expression pained. 

The words did not even seem real. Jesse smiled wanly, feeling the all-consuming everything again. “She would never have let you.”

“She was only one person. I should not have just stood by.”

Jesse watched as up ahead the path they were walking along wound around a little brook and trailed out of sight over yet another bridge. “Well, we know now that she had Belial on her side almost from the day I was born. You would have been overcome, even if you had brought allies.”

Gideon frowned in disgust. “Better me or my brother than a child not yet even of age.”

Jesse hugged his coat closer to his body and bent his face against the bitter wind. “Your children would have missed you,” he said.

Gideon looked down at Jesse and then away again as they walked, but his expression cleared.

“They hoped you would come to visit. Anna and Thomas, and Eugenia.” Jesse let himself smile.

They followed the path as it curved, each content in the other’s quiet for a few moments more, when Gideon said, “Your sister is welcome too, Jesse, if you think she would like to join us. I believe she is staying with the Fairchilds, but —”

“I do not think Grace would want to be there,” Jesse said cautiously. The subject of Grace was still a far-too-tender bruise to all the others. “Our mother never raised her to feel any attachment towards her adopted relatives. She feels nothing towards any of the members of our family. Only — only Christopher.”

She had told him to keep his distance while they were in Idris, though he had offered to visit her. 

“You belong with them, because you are good, and I do not, because I am not,” she had said emotionlessly. She had become so good at feeling nothing over the years, burying anything that touched her, looking down upon it with a dead expression. He hated that he did not know when he had lost her.

“Gracie —”

“Jesse, you will be attached to Lucie at all hours of the day, and I do not want to force her or her brother to be near me any more than I already have.”

There would be time later for him to tend to Grace, he knew, and for her to heal. They would have time. But that time was not yet.

Gideon's jaw clenched. “Will you tell her that Gabriel and Cecily would be happy to talk to her, if she ever feels she needs to?”

They had all become so very tangled, Jesse thought.

“Of course.”

The two of them reached the Lightwood residence, a little charcoal-coloured terrace tucked away on one of the corner streets a ways down from where the Herondales were staying. Gideon pushed open the door, and together they entered silently. 

The dark hallway opened up into a cool-toned drawing room, high-ceilinged with a staircase that spiralled upwards and out of sight at the far end. Pale winter light fell through the windows and onto wallpaper that had aged slightly, and plush furniture lay scattered about in a way that told of the house being well-loved by the family within it. A bookshelf lay tucked into the far corner, and next to it was Anna, perched on a settee along the windowsill and looking out at the cobbled street beyond, one leg dangling down and brushing the floor. Thomas had tried to curl himself into an armchair nearby, though his long legs still stretched impossibly out in front of him the way they tended to everywhere he placed himself.

“Hello, Jesse,” Thomas said softly, managing a very slight smile. “I see the Herondales have allowed you to be relinquished from their grasp.”

Jesse smiled, taking a seat. “They did not. I slipped away,” he replied. Anna and Christopher’s parents were nowhere to be found yet, but there were still so very many Lightwoods in this room, and he could not help but brace himself, knowing it was irrational, feeling trepidation all the same. He knew he did not match them. He had green eyes where there should be blue, and black hair where there should be brown. He did not resemble any of them at all. 

He clung to Thomas’s steadily outstretched kindness like a lifeline. “Lucie does not know that I am gone.” Though his note for the Herondales lay tucked into her book, his handwriting settling next to hers in a way that ran like golden thread through his chest.

“We should all expect Princess Lucinda to come to Sir Jethro’s rescue with her axe swinging, then, I presume,” Anna said astutely, and Jesse flushed. She cocked a sly grin at him.

The feeling of blood underneath his skin was still so strange. He wondered if it would be strange all his life. 

“Oh, Jesse,” a voice said, and Jesse turned to glance at the opposite corridor, where Cecily Lightwood stood. She looked steadily at him, and her eyes told him that she was smiling, even if her mouth could not quite follow through. “It’s nice to properly meet you, especially as yourself. Thank you for saving Alexander.”

She did not say the words thank you for saving my son. It would not have been the truth.

“It was really only Anna, Cordelia and James,” Jesse said, heart in his throat. He wondered if it had been a mistake to come here. She seemed so delicate. All of them seemed like porcelain people, and he, with his Blackthorn blood and his awful upbringing, felt like a hammer about to smash them into pieces.

“And you,” Cecily said, keeping her dark blue eyes on him, so like her brother’s. They both had the very slightest tinge of a Welsh accent in the way they spoke. Jesse wondered if she used Welsh endearments to her children the way Will did. He still remembered watching Will speak to Lucie in her bedroom, his eyes so full of affection. Lulu, fy nghariad bach.

Gabriel, who had followed in behind her, was watching his wife with such gentle and sad fondness that Jesse wondered if he should look away, his uncle’s expression seemed so private. He soon turned to Jesse and smiled.

“You really do look exactly like your father,” Gabriel said, voice hoarse from disuse and grief both. This observation always made Jesse feel as if his lungs were aglow, and he felt it tenfold now that he had truly met his father, in a way. 

“So, Jesse —” Gideon started, clapping his hands together and turning back to Jesse nervously. Eugenia, who had arrived at the base of the stairs, rolled her eyes.

“Papa, honestly, you’re making it seem like we’ve kidnapped him,” she chastised. Gideon grimaced at Jesse apologetically, and Sophie touched at his arm. He sank back into a nearby armchair.

“We simply wanted to talk with you,” she said, looking at Gabriel and Cecily. “We were never able to when you were a child, and then we did not get the chance, after you came back… before Belial.”

“I am very grateful.” He bit down on his next words for the moment, telling himself he should repay their kindness with only kindness in return, that they did not need to spend the night before Christopher’s funeral being bombarded with more distress especially since he had scarcely just walked through the door, but the black pit of guilt in him could not help but crawl up into his throat. “I know we do not know each other as well as we should.”

There it was. The subject had been broached. Jesse hated that they had to do this. He hated that he could still remember shrinking back from Gideon’s outstretched hand.

Gabriel strode across the room, his hands clasped behind his back. His face was tense. “Jesse… well, firstly, I know that you may not feel comfortable using familiar sentiment toward us when it is our own fault you have never known us. You should not feel as if you have to call us Uncle Gideon or Uncle Gabriel.”

Jesse started. “I did not mean —”

“We just wanted you to have the chance to meet your family. Properly.” Gideon’s face shuttered, and his eyes dropped to the flames lulling in the fireplace. His hand was clasped tightly with Sophie’s atop the arm of the chair. “I am truly sorry it is a meeting that has come so late.”

Jesse smiled gently. “It isn’t your fault. I was quite unreachable for a while.”

He’d aimed to be lighthearted, but Jesse saw Gabriel clench his jaw so hard it was a wonder his teeth hadn’t cracked inside his mouth.

“Do you… do you remember when I came to the house with Will?” Gideon asked quietly.

“Yes.”

He had not had Grace, yet. It had only been he and Tatiana. The two of them made up Jesse’s whole world, a world of abandoned, twisting hallways and darkness and the musty smell of dark magic and his mother wearing a dress stained with decades-old blood day after day after day. There had been no light anywhere for him. Not yet.

“That was not the only time I made an attempt. I would like you to know that, at least.”

He looked to his brother, who looked back with an indecipherable expression, and then approached Jesse, who felt rooted to the spot. He could hardly fathom that any of this concern was meant for him. Every one of the figures in Tatiana Blackthorn’s stories had been so monstrous to behold in his own mind that it was still a wonder to see them direct their smiles at him.

“Even at the end,” Gabriel said lowly, “we tried to maintain a relationship with her. We tried so many times. We’d always hoped we would be able to build a relationship with you someday.”

He was not used to so many people looking at him. He was not used to so many people being able to see him. He felt as if any moment, he would disappear. Jesse swallowed, looked out the window, looked back to the fire, looked up at Christopher’s parents, swallowed again. He could not seem to speak.

Cecily looked to Anna across the room, mother and child watching each other for one unspoken moment. At once, Anna rose and scooped up Alexander in her arms, whispering into his ear as they made their way from the room into the next hall and tickling at his sides so his squeals of delight rang out behind them. Thomas made his way out soon after.

Eugenia stayed. Jesse didn’t mind. If he had been left completely alone, he wasn’t sure what he would have done.

The words burst forth as if they were a flood.

“How can you stand to have me here? How can you stand to even look at me? I know you are extending your hospitality, and that we are related, and that you feel an obligation to take me in now that I am alive again and an orphan, but he — I'm… I cannot be here.” He’d risen from the chair and taken a step away before he realised what he was doing. His hands were shaking. 

Gideon looked even sadder at his outburst, and Gabriel’s jaw hardened. His eyes were wide as he looked over Jesse’s face.

“Jesse —” Eugenia started, but Jesse spoke over her.

“It was my mother who did this to you, all of you, and she was doing it all for me. You’ve lost so much, because of me, because she —”

“Jesse,” Sophie said, “the Lightwoods don’t have very many family left. You’re our family. We’d never ask you to leave, not when —”

“This is why we wanted to talk to you,” Eugenia said, and a sad smile rested on her face when he looked at her. “We are just doing a hopeless job of it.”

“When you were born,” Gideon said, shifting forward in his seat, grasping Sophie's hand more tightly on the arm of the chair, “Tati would not let us come and see you. We did try. She refused. She would not even let us come to the funeral.”

Gabriel scoffed. “Obviously, now we know that was for a different reason.” He looked across the room to Cecily, whose face was unflinching as tempered steel when she looked back at her husband. “That was how she wanted it. One each of our children dead at her hands. I do not think she would even have stopped there.”

Jesse’s breath rattled inside his chest. His oldest cousin Barbara, dead at his mother’s request. She had been born only a year after he. And Christopher, Christopher, who was bright-eyed, who was intelligent, who was kind to his sister in the dungeon she’d been placed in. Jesse would never be able to thank him for treating his sister like she deserved compassion when she had been alone. Both of his cousins had died of the poison Tatiana had inflicted upon them.

“Kit, he —“ Cecily paused, voice failing for just a moment, and then steadied herself “— he never understood why it was he didn’t know his Aunt Tati. We told you all stories about her, Eugenia, remember? He was so inquisitive. He used to ask us why we didn’t just say sorry and give her some sweets to make it all better.”

Not one of them had cried, but all four looked as if they had been gutted from the inside, as if the windows in the house had all been boarded up, the curtains drawn. And for all that Jesse had lived with death caressing at his sides for eight long, cold, endless years, he did not have the slightest idea how to confront it when placed so unavoidably in front of him.

“Jesse, did Tatiana ever tell you what happened to your grandfather? What really happened?”

He answered slowly, knowing it would be wrong, knowing this was one of the stories she had twisted up the most. 

“I know that he… that you were all there. And that my father died. And that he…”

“Was a worm,” Eugenia interjected helpfully.

“Yes,” Jesse said, plowing on. “I don’t want to say more than that. I know it is likely the complete opposite of what happened, coming from the tongue of my mother.”

“What happened,” Gabriel Lightwood said, “was that I was a coward and stayed with my father even when I saw him doing vile, wicked things, and I only ran to beg for mercy when it was too late, and your father was killed, and your mother was driven mad.”

Their faces were all so very hollow, Gabriel’s most of all.

“Jesse,” he said, voice rougher than ever. “Gideon and I know better than most what it is to have been raised by a parent who meddles with darkness. And I know better than anyone what it is to bear that weight upon your shoulders and feel as if it is your own burden.”

Jesse stood for a few moments, helpless. His voice came out only faintly when he spoke. “Only I knew what she was really capable of. Christopher —” 

“It was my father who killed yours,” Gabriel said. “It was I who made the choice not to run for help until it was too late. It is me who must shoulder that burden. It is not your fault that Christopher was caught in the crossfire of battle, no matter your relation to the person who killed him.”

The room was quiet. Eugenia was watching her uncle, a broken look of pride on her face, and her expression was mirrored on both her mother’s and aunt’s. Gideon still sat watching the floor, eyes far, far away.

Gabriel looked out the window, a deep line carving itself across his brow. “Nephilim view death in battle as the most honourable way there is to die. I do not know what Kit thought about it, because he always saw his and Henry’s laboratory as his weapon and his tool. But he helped people, and that is all he has ever wanted to do.”

“He was kind to me,” Jesse said softly.

Christopher had spoken to Jesse like they’d known each other all their lives. He’d spoken like he valued Jesse’s opinion as much as his own, and he’d asked for Jesse’s thoughts, and he’d looked at him exactly the same way he looked at everyone else instead of like he was looking at a dead boy. The ghost of a ghost.

Gabriel smiled. His eyes were bright.

“I am glad.”

Beside them, the fireplace crackled, enveloping them all in a robust warmth that seemed to ease its way into every one of Jesse’s limbs.

“Jesse,” Cecily said, in a voice that, if not quite soothing, still somehow seemed to calm him. “I promise you are not intruding on us in any way. We would like you here with us for as long as you would like to be.”

After the conversation had settled, and Jesse had thanked his uncles and aunts profusely for asking him into their home so openly, he and Eugenia made their way down the corridor that Anna and Alexander had disappeared into. 

Jesse could not find any words to say. He needed a moment to himself to absorb all that had been said to him. All of the grace he had been shown by people he’d been told his whole life were monsters. 

He could hear Anna's voice floating down the hall as they approached the door at the end, gentler than it had ever sounded. It was soothing and melodic, not like her usual husky self, and Jesse realised all of a sudden that the person she sounded most like was Cecily.

“You remember what Mama said, Alexander, about how Christopher had to go away for a while? How he’s very sorry he didn’t get to say goodbye?”

The door was open part-way, and when they reached it, Jesse could see a bare-boned room that might have once been a study and Anna sitting on the floor with her younger brother, murmuring so softly against his ear as she hugged him. Thomas was nowhere to be found.

Thomas wasn’t to be found much of anywhere, really. It was like he couldn’t bear to stay still. Like he couldn’t bear to be anywhere at all.

Little Alexander was nodding very seriously at Anna’s question. Jesse could see the slightest bit of the angry red scar left on his chest from the unfinished rune, and his stomach felt hollow. How far had his mother gone to see every one of her family fall?

Anna nodded back to him, mimicking the widening of his big blue eyes. “Well, he’s in the sky now, baby boy. He’s going to watch over you, so you won’t get hurt ever again.”

Jesse hovered outside the door for a moment, trying to be quiet, so Anna could whisper to her brother in peace. It was still so strange to have to put effort into making no noise, but the creaking of the floorboards made him feel grounded. The sound told him that he was really there.

“Is he going to be a faerie?” Alexander asked.

“No, Alex. He’s going to become one of the stars. You remember how he told you about the balls of gas, and all the energy that stars make?”

Alexander nodded.

“You know Kit-kit loves his explosions. He’s gone to become a supernova. An exploding star.”

Jesse swallowed down the rest of his hesitance and pushed the door open gently, though the hinges still creaked, and slipped into the room. Anna looked up at him and smiled, closing her eyes briefly, so that for a moment Jesse could see the true weariness and grief in her face. She pulled back from her brother and gestured towards the door.

“This is Jesse, Alexander. Say hello.”

Alexander turned and peered at him inquisitively as Jesse padded into the room, taking a seat on the floor next to Anna.

“I've seen you,” Alexander said. 

Jesse smiled. “I’m sure you have. I’ve been hanging around a little bit. I’m — I’m your cousin.”

Alexander blinked at Anna dubiously when he heard this. “More cousins?” he said, and Jesse laughed.

Anna grabbed his hands in hers and smirked, her eyes fond. She and Alexander shared the exact same blue eyes, the same black hair. It was only Christopher who had been born with hair that was lighter and eyes that were strange and magical.

“What, you can’t make room for any more cousins? You silly thing,” she said, and brushed her fingers softly under her brother’s chin. He giggled, and she flashed a grin.

In another life, maybe, Tatiana Blackthorn would have mourned this way with her brothers when her only son died. In another life, Jesse would have known his uncles before the age of seventeen.

“Hmm, but I wonder who your favourite is?” Eugenia mused, tapping her chin mock-thoughtfully as she followed Jesse into the room. 

Alexander squealed again. “Genie!”

Anna let her hands drop as her brother ran over to Eugenia, who smiled down at him with such tenderness it brought a lump to Jesse’s throat. She took her place on the floor and began combing her fingers through Alexander’s downy hair. 

They sat together in comfortable silence, watching the two for a moment.

“How's your little Luce?” Anna asked him.

It had only been this morning that Anna had last seen Lucie, but all of them had gotten far too used to checking in at all points of the day for those few days holed up in Belial’s hell. Are you alright? Where are the others? Have you eaten? Did they see you come back inside?

“She's doing a lot better, I think,” Jesse said. “She’s already started writing again. She says Idris is a fountain of inspiration for the soul.”

Anna laughed. “Always so predictable and yet so unexpected,” she said, rather mysteriously. Jesse sensed there was more she wanted to say, and kept his silence. After a moment, she turned her head towards him.

“Is it ever strange to you that you are younger now? You would have been the oldest of all of us aside from Charles. But instead, we are all older than you.”

“I think it would have been stranger to me,” Jesse said, knowing it was rather a bittersweet thing to say, “if I had ever gotten the chance to know you.”

A complex expression passed over Anna’s face before mellowing once more. “It is a pity we didn’t grow up together, Jesse Blackthorn. You are a puzzle. I have no doubt we would have been thick as thieves.”

A lush warmth bloomed in his stomach. “Well, I cannot think of any honour higher,” Jesse said, teasing only slightly. 

Anna turned back to face her brother, her blue eyes sparkling. “You are undoubtedly tough. We are a strange amalgamation of a family. We rather pile on top of one another, and it is hard to tell cousins from friends, and mothers from aunts, or fathers from uncles, but you have taken it all in remarkable stride.”

She knelt forwards, then, picking Alexander up by the waist and placing him in her lap. She ran a hand absent-mindedly through his mop of hair while Eugenia reached out to poke him in the cheek, and he stuck out his tongue. 

“When all of this passes, and we are in London again, I will take you shopping for the finest attire one can buy,” Anna said with finality. “You must be fitted as if you were really Sir Jethro in Lucie’s stories.”

Jesse glanced over at her and smiled. “Yes, I am sure that I must.”

Far above them, the missing piece of the Lightwood family sat on the roof, alone, holding a piece of paper in his trembling fingers.

There had always been another body next to him when Thomas had climbed up here, though neither of them had done so since they were much smaller. This time, he’d had to half-force himself through the upper window to manage what had once been a climb as easy and familiar as breathing.

He remembered when they’d been ten and eleven, Christopher’s circular glasses slipping down his nose, pressed side by side against the wind so high up over the winding paths of Alicante. They’d been able to see tiny specks of people milling about the Accords Hall in the distance. Kit had still been bigger than him then, and when he spoke to Thomas so earnestly of all that he hoped for Shadowhunters, and how he wished to blend the mundane scientific and the magic of Downworld, his belief that he could do good if he set his mind to experimentation and perseverance, Thomas had shyly asked if there was any scientific way Christopher knew of that could make him taller.

“You are not as big as your father because he is a grown man, and you have barely begun growing, Tom,” Kit had said. Thomas had glared stormily down at the people on the street far below.

“Everyone is always smothering me because they think I am so frail and sickly and I cannot do anything myself. Barbara will barely let me spar with her or even look at weapons, and Eugenia thinks I am complaining about being pampered.”

Kit had studied him for a while, then pulled his legs up so his still-knobbly knees were tucked below his chin. “Even if they never let you touch a weapon, I will be fighting in my own way, and there is no reason they can’t let you fight with me.” He adjusted his glasses on his face and looked over at Thomas, who was watching him rather stupidly. It had never occurred to Thomas that the magic Christopher was able to produce was magic that could be shared. “My mother says explosions at such frequent rates are not very good for your head. You can watch over me.”

Another time, Christopher had curled up into a ball and cried very uncharacteristic, worrying tears, and Thomas had awkwardly patted him on the back with wide eyes and wondered if he should fetch Anna.

“What if they never listen to me?”

Thomas had immediately decided that any Shadowhunter who ever made Kit feel stupid like this could walk right into Edom. “When you find a way for science to make me tall,” he said, “I will shout down at all of them until they have no choice but to.”

Christopher sniffled himself to a stop. “The science that is going to make you tall is biology,” he said, frowning at Thomas, who’d only smiled.

When Barbara died, Thomas had thrown himself into the laboratory with Kit, into the role he’d been familiar with since they were both small; the dutiful right hand who bounced ideas off of the mad scientist. Watching him work was calming in a way mourning was not. Thomas trusted Kit above everything. He had known this was where he was needed the most, where Christopher needed him, where Barbara would have urged him to be.

When Christopher himself was attacked, Thomas had forced himself to focus, to brew the antidote Kit had known would work, to be helpful in the way he and Kit had taught each other since they were young. But now all the fighting was over, and Belial was gone, and there was nothing more to distract him.

And he could not run. And there was nowhere he knew how to be helpful.

Thomas sat alone and let the wind pull at him bitterly. The air was always far fresher and cleaner here than in London. He wondered if it made it any colder.

He wasn’t even really sure why he was up here, but Thomas had known that he needed to be alone somewhere Christopher had once been, and that being in a house already grieving so much would surely choke him. But it had felt wrong climbing up here all alone, so Thomas had planned a vigil.

He’d thought first of bringing a candle, Kit’s stele, a ratty old shirt with holes in the sleeves from one too many chemical burns, a worn notebook from the laboratory. He’d even considered bringing some lemon tarts.

And then what? Throw them off the roof and hope they don’t land on anybody’s heads?

There was only really one thing he knew he felt brave enough to do, and one thing that meant he would not need to speak aloud his farewell, to put words to the unthinkable. He drew out his new stele to mark out the runes on the crumpled little scrap of paper, skimming once more over the words as he did.

Christopher,

I would like to tell you to haunt us, but I know you wouldn’t enjoy that. You are much too nice. It is you who is the truly kind one of us four, not me. Jamie, Math and I are nothing but heathens when compared to you.

I am going to miss you every single day for the rest of my life. But I'll make sure they still know who you were. I won't let any of them forget what you did for us.

I know it was never something that was on your mind, but I think, probably, that if you had ever asked me to be your parabatai, I would have said yes.

Goodbye, Kit.

Ave atque vale.

Fire quickly engulfed the letter, and Thomas watched the breeze carry it away from him. 

He did not know where the fire-message would take itself when there was nobody to send it to, and he did not much care. Maybe it would simply burn away into ash. Thomas crossed his legs and sat unmoving, watching the distant sky.

He wasn’t sure how long it had been when the rooftop slats began to creak behind him, but the sky had begun to turn ever-so-faintly purple with the dusk, and his body had all but gilded itself together, his muscles tight with utter stillness.

The creaking stopped, and then Anna sat down beside him, draped in a silk robe with a plain linen shirt and trousers underneath. She did not speak, and Thomas did not answer, but she touched at the side of his head and gently pulled it down until his cheek was resting on her shoulder, and together they sat and watched the sky fade to lilac.

“When you especially miss him,” Anna said, her voice rough from lack of speech, and muffled from Thomas’s ear being buried in the crook of her neck, “you come and find me, Tom. Okay?”

Thomas swallowed. The colour of the sky was darkening rapidly now. He wondered if it would snow.

“I will miss him all the time, Anna,” he said very quietly.

She ran a hand over his hair. “Then you shall have to come and find me all the time.”

Thomas did not respond, but he tucked his head more firmly against the slope of her neck, and she rested her own head down atop his. It was a cloudless night, and the air was colder, the breeze beginning to become biting rather than merely crisp.

“And you must bring along that beau of yours,” Anna added. Thomas could tell she had started to smile.

“Oh, shut up.”

Anna had sat on the opposite side to where her brother had always placed himself on their rooftop sneakouts, so the space next to Thomas was still empty. He was glad. Christopher Lightwood deserved to have a space kept just for him.

Anna had disappeared not long before sunset, and Jesse had spent a while longer sitting with Eugenia, watching his little cousin Alexander tire himself out and letting Eugenia’s soft voice filter over him as she mused on who would be the next Inquisitor, and how it really was disappointing that the Clave were always so paranoid about favouritism because in her opinion her father was the most logical choice. Jesse wholeheartedly agreed.

When he could see stars beginning to dot the sky outside the window, he decided that he’d taken leave of the Lightwoods’ hospitality long enough, and he rose from the floor to make his way soundlessly down the corridor. Neither Eugenia nor Alexander saw him go.

He’d just begun to put on his coat, standing alone in the shadowed entryway to slip out silent and unnoticed, when —

“Jesse, darling.” 

He spun round.

Jesse had heard so many monstrous things from his mother about the maid Gideon had married and the scar that marred her face. Awful, twisted things filled with his mother’s most personal poison, about how she was hideous, how she was cheap and filthy, how her husband had settled for the lowest of the low and couldn’t even manage to find one whose skin was still intact. He had never heard anything but nightmares about any of the other members of his family.

He hadn’t thought, when he encountered that face, that his first thought would be how kind it was.

“Aunt Sophie.”

“I see you are off,” she said gently. Something in her expression was telling him that she knew he’d been trying to vanish rather than simply departing.

He felt his cheeks darken, and was thankful he was hidden by the dusk.

“You have all been kind,” he said quietly, voice only a breath above a whisper. “I do not wish to overstay my welcome.”

There had to be a line, didn’t there? Jesse, you may stay. Jesse, we want to know you. He had not lied. They’d been so kind. 

But Jesse, you don’t belong here this way, not yet, not this fast.

Sophie watched him for a moment more, her face open and calm. “Jesse,” she eventually said, “we would all like you to know that you are under no obligation to spend time with any of us simply because we have asked you to, or because we are your family.” Her voice was reassuring like she knew he was still so frightened, like she’d guessed he was still far beyond overwhelmed at the sheer prospect of all that was in front of him. “You may come and go as much as you want, or you can come not at all, if you don’t prefer it. I know the Herondales have already ingratiated you very much into their midst, and it is completely up to you. But, if you would like to,” she said, “we would all very much like it if you stayed here with us, in our house.”

Jesse looked at her, then glanced back at the door, the twilight outside filtering in through the frosted glass above. He could not quite bring himself to look at her in the eyes as he spoke, voice almost inaudible.

“Will others in Alicante not look down on it? They know who I am now. They know who my mother was.” It would look very strange, to all the onlookers, to anyone who had only heard whispers of what had happened in London. That’s Tatiana Blackthorn’s son. The dead one. Didn’t she kill one of the others? Didn’t his mother kill one of their own?

He wondered how much darkness and rot Tatiana had injected into his heart that he hadn’t been able to find yet. He wondered how Grace had not collapsed under the weight.

She gently touched his shoulder, and when he turned, his cheek, her rough fingertips against the high point of his cheekbone. This was motherly love he had never had. He had gotten pinches and pats and tugs at his hair and weeping over his face as he stood before her because all he did was remind her of the father he hadn’t known and all he was to her was a prize she had been allowed to keep.

Sophie watched him very intently. “I did not know your mother the way many of the others did, and she has never had one kind word to say about me in all the time that I have. But it’s very clear to absolutely everyone that every bit of humanity she lost in her isolation was all given to you.”

Jesse could not think of anything to say for some time, and he stood helplessly as she waited for him to take in her words.

Finally, he mustered up the courage to get out a weak, “I do not wish to intrude.”

Sophie pulled her hand back from his face. She was so like Thomas, Jesse thought. Her son shared the size of her heart.

“You are as much a Lightwood as you are a Blackthorn. You have every right in the world to be here.”

Jesse didn’t want to worry Lucie, and he worried that staying with the Lightwoods would seem a snubbing of the generosity the Herondales had shown him since he’d woken again. He was so endlessly grateful for Will and Tessa, and for James’ solid friendship and unwavering faith, and he could not think of Lucie Herondale without wildflowers bursting from his chest and the mad urge to write about her the way she wrote about everyone else. But he would have a thousand days with Lucie after this one. He would have every single day of this life full of love she had given back to him. 

“I don't know what you’re going to tell Lucie,” he said softly, smiling, that light that he knew now was life glowing deep within his chest. “She may be quite persistent in hauling me back.”

Sophie smiled warmly. “Lucie’s mother is the dearest friend I have ever had,” she said. “I am well-versed in wrangling both of her children.”

She departed soon after with a reminder that she would be back soon, and that supper was laid out in the drawing room for him, if he was hungry.

“And Jesse,” she said, taking his hand for a moment and squeezing it gently, “I am very glad Lucie found you.”

He made his way shyly back into the next room, where someone had laid out tea and toast, and Anna and Thomas had returned, a blanket wrapped around both of their shoulders. Each of the Lightwoods had picked up bits of food and drink and were haphazardly placed about the room, leaning into each other and speaking gently to one another. Alexander was asleep in his mother’s arms.

“Did Sophie tell you where she was going, Jesse?” Gideon asked, a steaming cup of tea nestled in his lap. Eugenia was perched on the arm of his chair and leaning into his shoulder so she could read the book he had propped open on his knee.

“I believe she might have gone to tell the Herondales I will be staying with you,” Jesse said. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything amiss, and he supposed nothing had really even been amiss. He could be with his family as much or as little as he wanted, and they would still welcome him.

“I apologise that we are not putting on more of a feast for you,” Cecily said apologetically. Jesse shook his head. This was more than he had dreamed of.

He pushed every one of the words trying constantly to burst from him down, knowing there was no point — my mother killed your son, and I was there, and I did not protect him even when I could sense what she was planning, and I was not in your lives for twenty-four years, and I have filled his space in your house on the eve of his funeral. And not one of you seems to mind.

He was glad that he had not asked his sister to join him here, even regardless of the lingering wariness between her and the rest of their group. She would not have understood their kindness at all. She would have seen them as trying to gain something from her. Jesse was still struggling to understand it himself. 

He took the mug of tea Anna passed him from across the floor and sipped it. The flavour was rich and sweet, and it warmed him from head to toe.

It was perhaps half an hour of Jesse watching the Lightwoods swap stories while he warmed his hands on his teacup before an ancient wooden creaking sounded from down the hall, and then a far too familiar voice.

“Jesse Blackthorn, you are quite ridiculous.”

Lucie Herondale strolled through the entryway and into the drawing room to face the other Lightwoods, boots clicking on the hardwood floor and the secret smile growing on her face as she and Jesse locked eyes. A chorus of hellos floated round the room, and Lucie waved at them all.

“You know I can just walk over here, if you are not where I am,” she said, eyebrows raised as if to ask him what on Earth he thought he was doing. “It isn’t the Atlantic Ocean. You mustn’t act as if we have severed a limb whenever we are apart.” She turned a little more shyly to the other Herondale in the room. “That’s alright, isn’t it, Aunt Cecily?”

Cecily’s weary eyes settled on her fondly. “Luce, you make me smile whenever I see you. You are always welcome wherever you may find me, my darling niece.”

“My darling nuisance,” Gabriel said behind her.

Though Gideon did not lift his head, he spoke in a deep voice that echoed about the room. “O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy father’s face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you.”

Lucie blew a stray lock of hair out of her face and made her way over to sit herself down beside Jesse. “Uncle Gideon, one day you are going to run out of Dickens quotes about my namesake to spout at me, and I am going to throw a party, and you will not be invited.” Gideon simply hummed and continued on looking down at his book, looking up only to greet Sophie with a kiss when she bent over his chair.

Jesse turned toward Lucie, her eyes aglow in the firelight. Surely she was uncomfortably warm, so close to the flames, but she did not show it, only facing him with a small smile. Her blue eyes were dancing, and he was mesmerised.

More of Dickens’ words rose to his mind.

He had never heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice; he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for him.

“Would you be terribly offended if I told you Lucie Manette was only my second-favourite character of that novel?” he said quietly, ducking his head so she would hear him. He saw it when the smile on her face grew, and a wicked glint appeared in her eye. She leant very close to him.

“I would not blame you, Jesse Blackthorn,” she said. “Dickens’ Lucie was not a secret princess.”

He brushed his lips against her cheek, so quickly nobody else could have caught it, and turned back to the others. Lucie leant against his shoulder and closed her eyes, beginning to tug idly at the ends of his hair with one hand.

“Thomas,” she said, “I sent post-haste for that parabatai of mine, and she is rousing her dastardly elder brother, so he may be in when you’re least expecting it.”

“Alastair Carstairs?” Gideon said, nonplussed. “Why —”

“Thomas and Alastair are laboratory partners,” Anna lied at once. “You recall they completed the Manticore antidote together? They have become accomplices since.” She turned to look at her father. “Thomas sent the first ever semi-successful fire-message to Alastair. They were integral to Kit’s investigation.”

Gabriel smiled. “What ho,” he whispered. 

“He’s got a baby to deal with,” Thomas piped up, pink with embarrassment. “I do not want to hassle them.”

“Thomas, my dear, if you think Sona Carstairs is too weak to manage a baby on her own, I'm afraid you’ve vastly underestimated the fortitude of women everywhere,” Cecily said.

Lucie looked apologetically over at her cousin, though her fingers did not stop playing with the ends of Jesse’s hair. “I'm sorry, Anna, but I didn't know where Flora Bridgestock was staying, and I didn't want to go around knocking on everybody’s doors.”

The signature smile that Jesse had started to recognise as Anna’s tugged very slightly at the corner of her mouth. “It's alright, pet,” she said kindly. “Ari will be round here sometime or other.”

Their haphazard, bittersweet gathering of family had continued late into the night, though all they had done was to sit in each other’s company, everybody’s voices soft and sad and sleepy.

The next morning, Jesse made his way down the stairs once he began hearing faint voices and the soft clinking of cups spiralling upward from the drawing room.

Alexander was still asleep. They’d shared a room, and though Cecily had pressed him with warnings about what a menace her son could be, he’d fallen right to sleep, only half-under the covers and his hair tousled all round the pillowcase.

Jesse reached the entryway, made his way into where the others were, and came face to face at once with Thomas Lightwood dressed in a white suit. 

He stopped right in his tracks. Thomas blinked back at him, fiddling with his cufflinks.

“A white suit?” Jesse said. His voice sounded faint to his own ears, but somehow the words still reverberated around in his head. 

“For mourning,” Thomas said, his voice ragged. The hollows under his eyes had only darkened during the night.

Jesse exhaled, trying to calm himself. His fingers did not quite feel like themselves. He swallowed, and his mouth felt like sandpaper.

A white suit. How had he forgotten?

Jesse knew what he would look like in a white suit. He knew it very well. He had been dressed up in white for almost a decade.

He saw it when Thomas realised what it was he was panicking about, his eyes going wide as saucers and mouth parting in alarm. He spun around to face Sophie.

“Ma, I don’t think Jesse —”

“It’s okay,” Jesse said, shaking his head. “I’m fine, I just — forgot —”

Sophie held up a hand, and he stuttered into silence. When she looked up at him, her eyes were tired. Warm.

“It’s all right, love,” she said gently. “There’s a small mountain of spare gear in the trunk upstairs, and not everyone is going to be in formal wear. I’m sure at least James will opt to wear gear with you.”

Moments later, Jesse was peering at his own reflection and trying to bring the feeling back into his limbs.

He was naturally pale, his father’s dark hair not helping him in that regard, but all of the mourning gear pulled on made his skin seem even lighter. As if it were almost translucent. The thought was cold right down his back, and he dug his fingernails hard into the palm of his hand. His knuckles went even whiter.

He grit his teeth and frowned at himself in the mirror, reminding himself to pull it together. He was being ridiculous. His white had not been funeral wear, because he had never gotten a funeral. His mother had wanted to prolong her pain, had only wanted to use his body to hurt people. She had not wanted him back, not really. 

This white was not for him. It was for Christopher. He would wear it for Christopher.

“You look dashing, Jesse,” his aunt Cecily said when he came back down the stairs. Runes were traced along her collarbones, her arms, and there was no sign of tears in her eyes, only grim acceptance and a stubborn pride.

Anna turned around from where she’d been standing and strode toward him determinedly. “Would you like one of us to do your runes for you? I can do them, if you need. Perhaps Lucie, if you hurry?” she said, glancing at her mother. Jesse ducked his head.

“I can do them myself, but I will admit I am still a little shaky with my stele, and I should be doing Grace’s for her.” The knife of guilt lanced through him again, as it had for days, but he could not pay it any attention now.

“Grace doesn’t wear very many runes, does she?” Cecily asked. Jesse swallowed, and shook his head.

“I don’t blame her,” Gabriel said darkly, picking up Alexander from where he was now crouching on the floor and inspecting his father’s boots. “Not after what she saw. There is nothing, I think, that Tati did not taint in that house.” 

Jesse glanced at the outside world through the glass. Sleet was dashing at the window, but the day was looking to be a light one. 

“She will want to wear runes for Christopher,” he said.

It was then that Thomas made his way back into the drawing room, freshly covered in lines of ink. “I can do them for you, Jesse,” he said. Jesse looked at him, and the way his hand was clenching and unclenching by his side, the way his head was half-bowed, the stark black runes on his arms and neck. The white band tied around his bicep. He nodded, and Thomas stepped up until he could reach Jesse.

“Where would you like them?” Thomas asked.

“Where are all of yours?”

Thomas touched his wrist, his shoulder, the side of his throat, and then his heart. Grief. Sorrow. Remembrance. Love.

They looked at each other, and Thomas tried to smile. It was difficult, to see him this way. To see him this lifeless. Jesse offered his arm, and Thomas took it gratefully.

Only after he’d started drawing did he begin to speak.

“I am glad you have joined our group, Jesse, and I’m very glad you stayed with us. I — well, I wanted to say, before, that I am — I am so sorry for what you went through, and it makes me feel truly awful to know that you were out there all that time, and that we just —”

Jesse grabbed his arm patiently, and waited until Thomas looked back up at him. He really did look wretched, and the thought pulled at his heart. That this family full of love, with love to spare for him, had had it so violently ripped away.

He didn’t mind having to say this again, knowing there was nothing they could have done no matter what they tried, knowing that to have people in his life who cared about his safety and his wellbeing meant more than whatever threats they could have made against Tatiana.

It was not their fault. It was not his fault. They had all suffered at the hands of the same evil.

“Thank you, Thomas,” Jesse said sincerely, meaning it more than he could put into words. “You are very kind.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened and his brows pulled together in the middle, though Jesse was not sure why, but he nodded, and let himself smile for the smallest of moments.

A group of them stood in the Imperishable Fields, larger than Thomas had been expecting. Most of the London Enclave had come to the funeral; the families of those who had been poisoned, who Christopher’s mind and nimble hands had saved. So many of them had been brought back from the brink of death with the antidote he had made only a few months prior, though it seemed to Thomas like whole lifetimes had passed since the summer.

There were white ribbons around each of their wrists, white flowers in their buttonholes and scattered in their hair. The freshness of each of the Marks stood out even more starkly against the funeral wear and the paleness of the day; the sky was utterly shrouded over with cloud, all of it milky-white.

Will had his arms wrapped around Cecily, one hand tucking her head under his chin, his fingers in her hair, her older brother trying somehow to keep her from the truth. But Aunt Cecily’s eyes were dry, and she was watching Charlotte at the front with a hard determination, one hand clasped in her husband’s fingers and the other brushing the hair from the top of her smallest child’s head. She looked up to the top of the pyre to where her boy would soon lay, high up in the sky, and then looked back at Charlotte, her eyes even fiercer than before.

There were very few people who truly knew just how proud Cecily Lightwood was of her son. But Thomas did. My beautiful boy, she used to say. Fy nhywysog bach.

Thomas knew, too, that Cecily and Will had lost their elder sister when they were children. She had been fourteen. Both of them knew the distinct pain he carried under his skin like a vow. And both of them too now felt the weight of what they had all lost.

Cecily had lost her son. And Will, too, knew what it was to lose someone closer than a brother. What it was to lose someone whose arms felt as if they were your own arms, whose eyes saw everything the way yours did and the way yours did not.

Thomas thought of his aunt touching at his cheek the night before, before he’d gone into his room to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling they’d always shared in Idris for hours and hours and hours. Missing Alastair, mourning Kit. Feeling nothing. Feeling far too much.

“I am so thankful you were there, Thomas. There when we couldn’t be.” She’d smiled at him, her blue eyes so like Anna’s and Alexander’s, and not at all like Christopher’s.

“But… but I wasn't there,” Thomas had said, throat so tight around the words it had hurt to talk normally and everything had come out all shrivelled. “I wasn't there for him.”

She’d pulled him down by the shoulder; no easy feat, considering his height, and kissed the top of his forehead. “I mean all the other times, darling. All the rest of the time, since the day he was born.”

She’d let him go to cast her eyes about the room, along the rickety wooden beds and the trinkets from a decade ago that still lay on the dusty bedside table.

“Push the beds together if you need more space,” she said. “You’re far too tall for the beds in this house. Your feet are going to hang off the end.”

Thomas smiled a little, looking over her shoulder to the empty hallway. “Where's Jesse sleeping?” A smile flashed quickly across Cecily’s face.

“He said he would sleep in Alexander's bedroom. He didn’t want him to be lonely.”

“Did you tell him Alexander likes to whisper to people at night and convince them to stay up very late?”

“I told Alexander that if he didn’t sleep the toe-munching demons would sense it and bite all his fingers off, too.”

Thomas looked on silently as the Silent Brothers carried the bier closer, the bier they’d watched leave through the Portal only a few days ago. His entire body felt numb. He felt bizarrely as though Christopher should have been standing beside him in matching white, watching on at someone else’s funeral. Instead, as the Silent Brothers parted the crowd and made their solemn way past, Thomas saw that Christopher lay still, unmoving, his eyes bound in ceremonial white silk. His eyeglasses had been placed between his clasped hands, and they rested on his stomach. His mouth was ever so slightly parted, as if he’d thought of something wonderful and been about to share it. 

Thomas felt his lip give one single, terrible tremble, and then he bit down on it, hard. He would not cry. He would be strong. When others cast their looks to him in pity, he would not let himself break. He pulled his shoulders back and stood at his full height.

The ladder was placed at the base of the pyre, and a single Silent Brother very gently lifted Christopher’s body from the bier and began to climb with him cradled in their arms. Thomas realised after a moment that it was Brother Zachariah. That it was Jem.

The Consul’s voice rang out then across the eerie stillness of the morning, commanding and unmovable as she had always been, the pillar that every one of their families needed.

“In our battles against the Prince of Hell Belial, Lord of Thieves, we Nephilim have lost one whose determination and intelligence has meant the difference between life and death for many of us here. We have lost one whose creative thinking pushed us always to do better, and to expand our view to those outside our own understanding of what it means to have courage, and to fight.” 

The torches had been lit, and more people had begun moving closer to each other, to him. Will, and Tessa, and Aunt Cecily and Uncle Gabriel, and Anna with Ari Bridgestock, and Thomas’s parents, and Matthew and James and Lucie and Cordelia, and Eugenia with glistening tear-tracks down both cheeks, and Jesse with Grace, who was a spectacle in all white, her silver hair billowing in the wind, though she wore no flowers in it. Charles, standing silently behind his father, whose fists were so tight against the arms of his chair they’d gone colourless. Thomas could see the veins in every one of Henry’s fingers. They caught gazes for just a moment, and then Henry’s face crumpled, and he could look no more.

“I know all of you are aware that Christopher Lightwood was and is dear to my family. I am Consul of the Clave, and I will not pay respects to some of our own and not to others. Every Shadowhunter who dies in battle is a life lost that bettered our people, who served the Angel when he himself cannot walk upon Earth.”

Charlotte looked out at them all, her frame so small and yet larger than all of them, white banners billowing behind her. Each of them had their eyes fixed on her as though she were a lifeline. A hand brushed Thomas’s where it was clenched at his side, dreadfully gently, and Thomas glanced to the side.

It was Alastair. Of course it was Alastair. 

His eyebrows were dark, and he did not look at Thomas, instead keeping his eyes focused on the pyre where Christopher lay. Thomas could not draw his own gaze away for a moment, and he wished madly that he could lean closer and press his mouth against Alastair’s jaw. It ached to hold himself still. He slid his fingers more firmly between Alastair’s and squeezed, far too tightly. Alastair squeezed back.

“But I will miss Christopher,” Charlotte said. “We will miss Christopher. And I have no doubt that his deeds and memory will impact Shadowhunters for generations to come.” She raised her hands to the sky. 

“Let Raziel bless him. Let Jonathan Shadowhunter honour him. Let David the Silent remember him. And let us commend his body to the necropolis, where he will serve forever.”

Charlotte looked at Jem, at Brother Zachariah, and he moved forward to touch the first torch to the pyre. Flames began to lick up the wood. Thomas looked up once more at Christopher, lying so peacefully under the white-grey sky. The ends of his hair were blowing gently in the wind.

He gripped Alastair’s hand, and Alastair’s fingers interlocked themselves more firmly with his. A thumb brushed light as a feather against the back of his hand.

“Ave atque vale, Christopher Lightwood,” the Consul called, and all of their voices rang out as one.

Ave atque vale. Hail and farewell.