William Herondale started planning for his death early. The first things he did weren't obviously informed by his mortality but when you looked back over the years the pattern was visible. The vampire accountant in Leeds was the first thing you might notice. He specialized in immortals, after all. Then there was the cottage in Wales on all that land that was in his wife's name. Later in his life the plans were specific and pointed. His lawyer thought him very proactive, "Most men your age are in denial that they'll ever die. Usually they need to be dragged in to sign their will and testament while proclaiming loudly that it won't be necessary for years and therefore should wait."
Will had laughed, "Oh, I'm not in denial, I'm going to die sometime around the year 2000, I figure, but still better to get it all dealt with, I plan to be an indolent old man and grow fat and lazy," but his face had grown serious when he'd said, "I don't want anyone else to have to deal with these questions later."
There were other things that had nothing to do with lawyers. There were letters. Hundreds of them. Stored in two separate boxes in a corner of his study. Each one addressed and dated. Over the years he would forget what exactly was in them. Sometimes he found himself standing with them and turning the sealed envelops in his hands. The ink visible through this one looked like poetry. What had he written on it? He'd grin then because that was half the point. They weren't really anything and he knew that some of them had been utter madness. They had no purpose except they were something he wished he could have and so he was leaving them for the people he loved.
One of them he wrote towards the end of his life was simply titled, "Things I would have said to James Carstairs on March 14, 1935," and discussed the water fowl outside the local library, his sore foot, how very good his hair looked, something Tessa had said over coffee that morning and the phrase "you right stupid bastard" with no other context. Then he'd drawn a poor rendition of a horse wearing a top hat instead of a signature.
Another one, this one in the other box, was another list, "Reasons I loved you today," and the first item had been simply, "Because you persist in being you," but also included a detailed list of nearly everything she'd done that day: swearing when she spilled the tea and grinning while talking to Lucie's sons on the phone and throwing a book at his head while he'd recited his rewritten versions of classic poems and the murmuring sigh she made when he kissed the side of her neck. It was written in multiple pens. He'd kept the list of it over the course of the day, adding to it when he'd had a moment. This one was signed with his name.
Some of them were to be sent on certain dates. He agonized over two birthday cards to be sent the year after his death. In the end he'd added them to the box, one signed "With love always, no matter where I am," and the other signed, "with love from your dead father on the occasion of your continued existence on this earthly plane," which he thought was hilarious but only one of his children was likely to agree with him on that.
Beyond those few, those ones to be sent on a few very specific dates, dates that he couldn't abide missing even if he was gone, the others sat in their boxes. They were more love letter to the future than anything else. Jem's would be sent. Yearly. They'd discussed it and decided on a place and a day. Jem wouldn't be able to keep them but he would be able to read them. Will never told anyone how he managed it. There were nearly 200 letters. There'd be a new one every year for 2 centuries. He'd hired the right people, pulled strings, and called in favours to make it happen.
Tessa though, he left with the option to decide what to do with the rest of them. They would be left for her, in their box, on the table in the cottage he had bought in her name just after the last of the children had left home. She could throw them in the fire if she needed to be free of the memories. She could read them all in a single night. She could space them out over years. Whatever she needed. He didn't tell her before. She would have hated to discuss it. It would have been painful for her to try and decide, ahead of time, which one of those options she would need most.
When William Herondale died he left as few lose ends as possible. His last thoughts were a prayer to anything that might be listening that the people he left behind would be able to take care of each other.
When a soul dies it moves on. If it does not move on, it risks being trapped. It risks becoming one of the ghosts who haunt the places they died and the graveyards where they were laid. When a soul moves on though, it might, sometimes, if it has a strong enough will and a bright enough light to follow be able to cross back though never for long. The echo of a soul is not a ghost. The echo of a soul must return to the proper side to turn with the wheel or cross over the river or to await what comes next. An echo is silent. The other side keeps its secrets close. The settled dead do not speak as the ghosts do.
Tessa hated mornings. Most of the day was busy if you wanted it to be but mornings were slow and quiet and designed for thinking. For 60 years she had been an early riser. The Herondales had started it early in their marriage. If they got up an hour before they were expected to be at breakfast, that was an uninterrupted hour together. In a century where propriety mattered, one wasn't supposed to touch one's wife quite as much as Will had always preferred. Those morning hours were for wrapping themselves up in each other before they had to go out and face the day.
Perhaps, it wasn't so much that Tessa hated mornings. It was that Tessa hated mornings that didn't start with random observations whispered in her ear or strong hands on her hips that pulled her back against a warm body. She would wake up and for a second still wonder if he was already awake or if this was one of those rare days where she'd have a few minutes to watch him sleep. She missed days that began with him leaning against her like an armrest while he read or his head resting on her stomach while he told her some story. She missed the mornings that left her gasping and laughing and late for the first business of the day.
So during that first decade after: she stayed up late. She woke up late enough that she had to roll out of bed and rush to be out the door on time. Every rushing morning was annoying and unpleasant but it was better than spending time alone with nothing to think about but how alone she was. There was an ache in her where a piece was missing, a piece that had been Will. She tried not to toy at the edges, tried not to push at the pain with memories. Mornings were so full of him that it was hard to keep the ache at bay.
She was staying up late the night that she pulled the box towards her and chose a letter from somewhere in the middle. They were a diary, really, but addressed to her. She rarely opened one but sometimes the loneliness was too much to bear. Each letter could tear the ache open and leave her sobbing for days. Sometimes it wasn't even the ones that she expected. One she'd opened was just a transcription of Maud which he had annotated. Harshly. That one had left her laughing. Then a few days later she'd found a poem in an anthology that used the same metaphors that he'd lambasted and the realization that he would never read it left her with shaky hands and tears threatening to fall.
But it had been ten years. Ten years of smoothing down the edges of her loss and learning how to be herself without him. Learning how to carry him with her without feeling that crushing need to have him beside her again. She wondered at people who remarried within years of losing their spouse. Were they stronger than her? Had they loved less? Did they find comfort in a new romance? Did they simply force themselves to forget?
Ten years passed but she was still holding on. She had been part of him and he had been part of her and she still couldn't see herself as something wholly separate. But she got up every day and every day she found something that made it worth it. Life was bigger than her. Life was bigger than the ache inside her.
She turned the letter in her hands. It was a test. As coming back to London had been a test. As coming back to this cottage had been a test. She couldn't let go of the memories but she couldn't let them drown her either.
"Will you tell me that he's doing well?" she asked the sealed letter and the empty room. It was a small cottage and old fashioned. There was no electricity. She read by lantern light and candles and cooked over a wood stove. The wooden walls needed painting and the floor needed sanded down and refinished. Maybe she would do that over the summer. Spend the season here. Get a book that taught those things and learn how to sand a floor and replace a drafty window. Wrap herself up in the memories until she learned how to swim through them.
This letter was the wrong one to read. He'd written it on one of those mornings that she missed so much. No record of when exactly. The date listed as just Thursday, 6:04am. She must have slept late that day. Across the top in small letters were the words, "sorry, got a little carried away." It started as a list of observations. Detailed observations. The pile of books by the bed, the colour of the duvet, the growing light, the way her hair lay on the pillow. It bordered on poetic. Will could write beautifully unless he was trying to rhyme. About halfway down the first page observations became, while not less poetic, much less domestic. By the end of the second page it had become surprisingly eloquent considering that it was utterly unrepeatable.
Though she was alone and a grown woman Tessa found herself blushing. It wasn't so much the content as the memories that it stirred up. Because those things weren't really fantasies. She could see the half-smile he would have had on his face as he'd written those things because she had woken up to him leaning over her with it on his face as he suggested them in a whisper. Things he never would have said aloud to anyone else. Things he would probably feign ignorance of if they were brought up by anyone else. Things she would definitely feign ignorance of.
She read it twice before she allowed her self to curl into a tight ball in the bedroom and cry herself to sleep.
She woke up cold and disoriented in early morning sunlight. The ceiling was streaked with the shadows of the tree branches beyond the window and the regular panes of the glass. She stared at the shifting light and took stock of her emotions before sitting up. Not happy. Not miserable. Too empty. She hated the empty days. She sat up and smoothed the blankets around her before looking up.
He leaned against the foot board of the bed. The shifting light didn't seem to affect him. He smiled just a little, tentative. A study in gray and white, he looked like a photograph not a ghost. She was used to ghosts who wavered at the edges but he could have stepped off a movie screen. He wore dark pants, a white shirt, his hair dark and a little rumpled. His eyes were dark as they watched her. Solid. Steady. Will.
She felt her mouth drop open and his tentative smile crumpled into a look like guilt. He looked stricken as though he'd realized he'd done something unforgivable. He straighted and stepped back moving towards the door. His edges wavered and she found her voice.
"Oh god, no," she said and her turned to look at her with a bone deep sorrow in his eyes. Her voice was choked and unsteady, "No, please, please don't leave. Stay. Just a little while. Please. I'm sorry."
He came back to her and knelt at the bedside so she had to look down at his upturned face. She studied it. It was ageless, neither young nor old, and concerned. There was concern in every line. Concern for her.
"Are you a ghost?" she asked. He frowned and shrugged.
"Are you doing well?" she asked the first tears welling but not falling. He smiled at that and reached a hand toward her face. If he had really been there he would have pushed her hair back and run fingers down her cheek. She could see is hand but not feel it as he traced the line of her cheekbone and her jaw. He nodded at her and there was a question in his eyes.
"Some days are better than others," she said. "I miss you." He leaned up and she could imagine the warmth of his forehead against hers. His hand on the back of her neck as he pulled her towards him. He'd done it every time he was going to be away for any length of time. Sometimes he'd said, "I'll miss you," and sometimes he'd said something else like, "I hate it when you're not there," but he always said it like this, forehead to forehead. Her tears were falling when he pulled away and though his expression matched hers, he didn't cry, maybe not-ghosts couldn't.
"If this is real," she said, "I need tea. If this isn't real, I still need tea." She stood up resolute and he stood with her. Armed with a quilt wrapped around her shoulders and his eyes on her, she went to get the stove going. He followed her looking around the room though his eyes never strayed far from her for long. She didn't let him out of her sight as she filled the kettle and set it to boil.
As she set out the tea pot and found a lemon she'd bought at market, he was experimenting with being incorporeal. He pushed his hand through the window glass and stepped into the table to examine it from the middle. She'd left the letter box and a glass of water there the night before.
"You were a dirty old man," she said waving at the letter she'd left on the table, the pages spread out. Past tense. She was getting better at using past tense to talk about him. It took practice. She used it even as he stood there as a reminder. Because it was a reminder. A visit. A memory. An echo. Not a return.
He examine the pages and then grinned at her. Wicked. The look that would precede him pulling her down into bed to do things good girls, even married ones, couldn't define. A flare of desire in the pit of her stomach made her smile back at him. She hadn't realized she'd forgotten what that curling heat felt like until it shook itself awake. She tried to ignore it but knew that it was written on her face. He'd learned to read her so well that she suspected he had some idea exactly what her subconscious had dredged up to go along with that feeling.
"For a not-ghost," she said. "You really should be more dignified than to stand in the middle of the dining table. Shouldn't you be a messenger of the beyond or some such thing? And yet here you are."
He was lifting his foot so that his toes clad in heavy boots appeared through the table top. His eyes, black and grey, met hers and he started to laugh. She couldn't hear him but silent peels of laughter shook his shoulders until he subsided into the giggles. A video of Will playing out in her kitchen. A silent film but sharper than anything she'd seen in the theatres.
"No one knows what lies beyond this life," she told him when he joined her, still chuckling as he walked intentionally through all the furniture between them, "I worry about you sometimes. That you're lonely or lost."
He shook his head, his look soft and gentle, and pointed a finger at her. She opened her mouth to say something reassuring but words tumbled out instead, "I'm lonely but I'm less lost every year. I've got Magnus and sometimes at least I've got Jem. Lucy insists that I visit. Jamie sends me pictures for my albums and still looks at me like he's an irate fifteen year old when I call him Jamie. I miss you most in used book shops and on Sunday mornings. I'm glad that you're here."
Concern chased its way across his face again and she reached for his hands and passed through them. Tears welled. An echo. A memory. Probably a figment of my imagination. He held a hand up like it was flattened against a pane of glass and she lined her smaller one up against his palm.
"You're worried that you were wrong to come. I can see it. You're worried about making it worse." His smile was sad. She closed her eyes and leaned up, putting her face where it would need to be to kiss him. "You're not making it worse. I needed to know. I need to know that you're out there somewhere. I love you. We're tied together, you and I, we always will be. I'm not asking you to stay, that wouldn't be good for either of us but I'm not used to planning for my future. It was always our future. Where will we go? What will we choose? Together."
He motioned her over with a tilt of his head to the box of letters and ran his fingers through them and then did it again until she joined him and ran her finger over them. It took her a moment to understand before she started to page through them. Each was sealed in an envelope with a date or a doodle on it. Sometimes her name. Sometimes nothing. She pushed each one to the side as he studied them over her shoulder. He stopped her at one that had a tiny clock drawn in a corner and she pulled it out.
"Should I read it now?" she asked him and he shook his head and waved his hand to tell her later. He held up a finger to his ear and cocked his head. An invitation to listen. She could almost hear his voice in her head. "We can still plan together, plan for you."
She settled onto the sofa with a cup of tea and he sat in the middle of the coffee table until she kicked him through the head a few times. He relented and sat beside her.
Then she talked.
She talked her way through decisions and ideas. Through dreams and frustrations. She talked about universities and grandkids and finally going to see China and Egypt. She told him about the shop and apartments in London that she wanted to buy and the book store she could put in downstairs. It was easier to imagine herself doing all those things alone when he smiled at her with all the faith in the world
As the morning wore on he started to grow less distinct.
"Busy spirit," she said, "Lots of places to be, I imagine." He laughed but his features weren't as distinct. A photograph out of focus now.
"Thank you," she said to him. "Even if you are just a figment of my imagination. Thank you. You'll never make it worse. Hail and farewell. I love you."
He leaned in so his face was right where it would have needed to be to kiss her and when she blinked to push the tears back he was gone.
The next morning she woke up early, the letter he'd chosen for her, lying on the pillow next to her. It was a letter addressed to Tess, Tess, Tessathat began, I hope this will find you when you need it most. We once wrote lists of things we wished for James and Lucie to see in their lives. The willful little creatures went and made their own lives, disregarding all our planning but maybe that was for the best. This list is the things that I wish for you. I realize that as a willful little creature yourself, you'll probably ignore ever word but these are the things I wish for you.
She read it. She read it again and then she read it aloud pausing as he would have. The next morning, for the first time, in a long time, she smiled at the rising sun as it crept up the bedroom wall.
Her not-a-ghost was an infrequent visitor. Sometimes he arrived when she needed him. Sometimes he just arrived. Once he saved her life. She kept him a secret. She kept his advice close and his smiles to herself.
After the night in Wales she didn't see him for more than 10 years. She'd started to assume that she had dreamed him up in a fit of grief. But on the day of Lucie's funeral he stood at her elbow. Silent, gray and white and wearing the same clothing he had been the last time.
She didn't stand with the family and the mourners. She could have. There were enough of them then that would still know who she was even if they hadn't seen her since they were children. It felt like an intrusion. She would have needed to be introduced to spouses and teenage children and the inevitable questions of just who exactly she was would come up and take over the day. This ceremony was about Lucie and the people she had loved. It wasn't about Tessa.
Jem came to stand on her other side. Just as silent and ghostly but corporeal. Of course he would be there. Jem had been the first person to hold Lucie when a complication in the labour had nearly killed them both. He'd always been protective of the girl over the years and she'd returned the fondness. Lucie had never been put off by the cold hardness of him when she crashed into his knees as a child or his silence and long absences.
"You saved her life the day she was born, didn't you?" she asked him still looking at the Shadowhunters gathered in their white gear.
I did everything I could but even then, only a few minutes old, Lucie Herondale was already saving herself, his voice whispered through her mind. Will looked at them both with a question on his face. He couldn't hear the voice. Jem couldn't see him. Together but so very far apart.
"Already saving herself," Tessa repeated for Will's benefit. "That's Lucie in a nutshell isn't it? How long can you stay?"
I can't. I am not to be here, he said and there was an edge to it that she hadn't heard in decades. This was as close to a true emotion she'd seen in him since 1938, the year after Will's death when he'd wrapped himself around the filthy dagger Will had buried on the road to Wales. There had been leniency from the Brothers in Jem's case. So often they'd taken advantage of that leniency but she could almost see them trying to pull him in, closer, tighter more obedient now that his parabatai had died.
"I'm glad that you're here even for a moment," she said. "She would be too."
The sparks of the funeral pyre flickered upwards into a rapidly darkening sky. The rhythm of the rituals spoken were audible though not the words. She stood between them and tried not to feel alone.
They repeated the ritual four years later at James' funeral. This time though she said the words, "Will's here," before Jem turned to leave her as the ceremony ended. He spun back. His eyes were sealed shut but he turned the full force of his attention on her. She felt it on her like a physical weight.
"It's possible he's a figment of my imagination but he's a very persistent figment," she said and for the first time, she explained it. She had only seen him three times but she laid them out. Jem never told her how much trouble he got in for spending the night sitting on the steps of the Fairchild mausoleum while they held an impromptu wake. For James, yes, but also for Lucie and Charlotte and the Lightwood sons and for Will himself.
As Will faded away, he smiled a smile that was sad but so genuine that it tore at the edges of Tessa's grief. She sat with Jem in the dark. Silent but together.
"We're the last ones left," Tessa said.
We're not, we're the last ones left here, but there is more in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy, he said.
The Hamlet quote took her so by surprise that she laughed. There were tears in the laughter but she was glad to know that she could laugh on that day. Jem did not quote Shakespeare. He had pulled that one out because he'd known it would make her laugh.
"I couldn't have wished more for them. Not for James or Lucie. They loved, they lived, they were good and honourable even on their worst days. Grief is for the living," she said.
So grieve, because you loved them and they loved you, came Jem's voice. He shouldn't have been there at all and he'd already spent half the night so they stayed and watched the sunrise from the graveyard. Tessa didn't smile at the colours that painted the sky.
She lost herself for a few years after that. She let the parts of the downworld markets that she had always avoided swallow her whole. She attended parties that were loud and wild and drank enough to forget her own name. She could never convince herself to go home with the men who offered though. Mornings nursed hangovers. There were lines that never got crossed but there were certainly lines that got skirted. Magnus's approach to morality was catching.
"You act like you're irredeemable," Magnus had said to her once after he'd caught her by the shoulders and spun her around. She had been ranting. "You've never done anything unforgivable. Never. You're a good person in a world full of bastards." He paused. A long pause where he held her in place and she glared at him. "I think I've got a bottle of wine, come drink with me." They hadn't been particularly good for each other in those years but at least neither was completely alone.
Coming out of it took a Russian warlock passed out on her couch who needed someone, anyone really to take care of her. Tessa owed her life to Charlotte for not putting her out of the Institute when she had ever right to and Natasha was a chance to pay that kindness forward. Someone to take care of was the first step in rediscovering who she was but it was a fire when she passed out on someone else's couch that really pushed her back into herself. Of all the moments she spent with her ghostly Will, this one would be the one she would doubt most strongly. It could have been a dream or a fantasy or a hallucination.
She hadn't been sober.
She'd woken to his photograph face above her, alarmed, eyes wide and mouth open as though he'd just finished a scream that she never heard. She had followed him through hallways, glowing white in a world of smoke and heat. She made it out of a building that had held a party only hours before. It burned to the ground in front of her as she curled in a doorway down the street and sobbed through the sirens and the pounding feet of mundane firefighters who couldn't see her. Will might have stayed with her. If he did he had wavered in and out of focus, every moment he was visible strain on him. She also might have imagined him.
She woke up alone, on a street corner. She went home and scrubbed her hair until the smell of smoke was gone then she started to clean up bottles and strewn clothing and didn't stop until the Budapest apartment she was staying in looked as stark as it had when she moved in, 2 suitcases of clothing and not a personal object in the place. She never went back.
When he appeared next in her bookshop 15 years later, she took him upstairs and read him modern poetry that he rated on a scale of one to ten by holding up his fingers. She told him stories of friends and magic she'd learned while recommitting his face to memory. The apartment was decorated in a modern style with knick knacks, books and photographs. It would take days to pack if she decided she wanted to leave.
The train wreck of the early 1960s had left her with shattered pieces to pick up and she'd reassembled them carefully. Slowly. At some point in the decade that followed she realized something. The part of her that he had taken with him when he'd died was no longer an ache. It had become a well healed scar. Visible and unavoidable but a part of her that didn't hurt any more.
When he faded away from her that time he did so with an expression that was a lot like the gentle contentment of those Sunday mornings in the Institute while they pretended they were the only people in the world. She didn't know until she saw it on him that she felt it too.
Content. Maybe not as truly happy as she had been once but whole again, rebuilt around her broken pieces.
Will appeared to her the night that Herondale family line died. She didn't know it then, wouldn't know it for a while after. He'd been distracted and volatile. She hadn't know how to help him, even to understand him. For the first time, she was the one doing the comforting. She talked and let him rant silently and collapse into the sofa. He ran his fingers over her photo albums and looked at her, a little pleading. She pulled them down and told him the stories she knew.
Marcus's sisters and their husbands. Melissa who had left the Clave and moved to Surrey and no one but her wife and Tessa knew why for sure. The wife was the scandal everyone heard but it wasn't the whole truth. Tessa laid out what she knew of Steven's ugly divorce. Where the Blackthorns had gone when they'd left England. Where the other Blackthorns had gone when they'd returned. What she knew of the Circle. Flipping through pictures she barely remembered and had to turn over to identify which batch of children were grinning from the swimming pool or who was proudly showing off their first marks and new training gear. Once the pictures had come steadily from James who had taken it upon himself to make sure that she had a record of Lucie's family too. Owen had sent them as his father had but no one was left to pick up the tradition after he had died and her knowledge was second and third hand now.
Will hadn't been settled or happy when he'd faded away but he had been grateful. He put his hand on the back of her neck and leaned his forehead into hers, a silent message, "I miss you, I hate it when you're not there."
She already knew something terrible had happened before she heard the news of vampires and suicides.
She didn't see him again until he appeared on the bridge on her wedding day. It was the happiest she'd seen him, sitting on a balustrade with his feet swinging. He stuck his foot through a pillar when he saw her looking and waved his boot at her giving her his best dignified, messenger from beyond look. She'd smiled before turning back to Jem and whispering why. He didn't stay long that day but he'd been there and for that she was profoundly grateful.
The morning after the ceremony, she woke before the sun and watched Jem sleep. He lay flat on his stomach, his face disappearing into a pillow, the sheets tangled around his waist. She kissed his bare shoulder and he half smiled in his sleep. She slid out of bed and chose a letter from the box that sat on the bookshelf. After being caught by a crushing wave of loneliness and no way to get to Wales in the 1970s, she'd parceled them out and stashed a few of them at the houses she came home to most often.
She and Jem were staying at the flat above the London bookshop. The woman who ran the shop had left flowers on the door step for them to find when they came home. She did it in spite of scolding Tessa that one didn't spend one's wedding night at home in a tiny apartment, one got a honeymoon suite. Tessa had laughed her off. She didn't want a honeymoon suite, she wanted Jem. The bouquet was mostly white roses and it sat on the kitchen counter where they'd left it along with most of their clothing. She could see the gold dress draped over a chair and Jem's jacket abandoned on the floor. Some how they'd managed to get a stocking looped over one of the lamps in the hall but couldn't remember how they'd managed it.
She picked a letter at random. Sealed. Her name on the front in Will's handwriting. Something drawn in the top corner but he was such a terrible artist it was unidentifiable. She didn't know what she was expecting it to be. Something to perfectly capture her emotions? Some fragment of his life and her life that would tie everything together? It was a narrative poem. An original narrative poem about a highwayman who wanted to steal a golden duck. It was unedited and terrible. Lines crossed out and rewritten. At the bottom Will had added, "I don't understand why you love me. I am obviously an utter madman. Do you have a particular affection for utter madmen?"
She collapsed laughing into bed with Jem who struggled awake as she wormed her way into his arms and tucked her head into his shoulder. He pulled her close and smiled at her as she giggled. His arms were strong and a welcome weight where they looped around her. He kissed her temple and she could feel his smile against her skin. Home had come back to her.
He didn't stay awake with her that morning or many of those that followed. He always seemed a little baffled that she would voluntarily wake before sunrise to read books and stroke his hair. Jem's breathing was the soundtrack of those moments but it was Will she spent those mornings with even if he wasn't there.
Because mornings had always been for her and Will in the suspended moments before the day began.
She smiled at the sunrise. She was more than content. She was whole and happy. The light climbed the wall and she started to plan a future with a "we" in it for the first time in too long.