He was still called Jon Herondale and he was was 3 the first time he met Clarissa Fray. He didn't remember much of that first meeting but she had been another child and he had so few of those in his life. He lived among warlocks and only got to meet other children at the park or in the supermarket. They never came over to play. He had thought himself special right up until he was almost ten. The only child allowed among the rooms of laughing, magic slinging warlocks with their oddly coloured hair and spiraling horns.
But Clary had been brought into Magnus's loft and put down on the floor near him while the adults talked over their heads. Smaller than he was, with hair red enough he imagined it might be warlock hair, she'd refused to listen to him when he told her the cat was bad. He remembered her scream when the cat had scratched her and the way Tessa had been the one to pick her up after her mother had shot him a glare like he was the one to blame.
Tessa was still a mystery to John back then. He had forgotten a lot of it but he knew she had stolen him when he was barely old enough to walk and all he had wanted for a long time was his father. He would find out later, a lot later, that his real father was dead, his real mother as well and the man with the blonde hair and the kind, stern face had been the one responsible.
Tessa had found out. When he was little he had thought it was because she simply knew everything. It had really taken a lot of suspicion and a lot of research and one cryptic message sent to a Silent Brother via fire message by Celine Herondale the night everyone else believed she had committed suicide. Tessa Gray had gotten enough help to sneak into the Wayland Manor house and kidnap a toddler while he slept. By the night Jon met Clary, he had just started crawling up into Tessa's lap to cuddle into her and ask for stories. Before that he had always waited quietly for her to pick him up because his father hadn't liked it when he wanted too much.
But Tessa picked him up when he cried and smiled when he leaned against her leg and asked for a hug. She held him when he had nightmares and sang him songs in other languages when he was sad. That night she had picked up the screaming little girl with the bright red hair and held her until she had stopped screaming, just like she would have done for him. Jon had been jealous, painfully jealous, and had leaned against her leg and tugged on her shirt until she gave Clary back to her mother and picked him up instead.
"Jonathan is Nephilim, as you are," Tessa had said though this part he didn't remember. The screaming, the jealousy, the glee at having another child to play with, those things he remembered but not the conversation. He had been told the story though.
"How did he end up with warlocks?" Clary's mother had asked and her voice had been shaking.
"I am his great-great-grandmother," Tessa said, "I was the wife of a Shadowhunter, I raised my children as Shadowhunters and when Stephen Herondale died, I had thought that family line had died in a storm of hate and violence. Your monstrous husband took their child and I took him back."
"If Valentine ever finds you," Jocelyn said.
"There is a part of me that is waiting for that fight," Tessa had said in the ice cold voice she so rarely used, "But he won't find us. The Circle has always underestimated Downworlders. We take care of our own. Jon is one of our own"
And then John and Clary had been put back on the floor to play, to fight over John's collection of trucks and crayons while the adults talked about protection spells and memory removal over their heads.
When John was seven, Clary had learned about the presidents in her mundane school and was telling him about them with waving hands while she coloured drawings of horses and he drew monsters and himself battling them.
"I'm CAF," she said, "Like JFK, someday when I'm president they'll call me CAF. I don't know why all the presidents don't get initials but I will. I'll also be the first girl president and an artist all at the same time. What are your initials?"
"JCH," he had told her.
For the rest of that visit they had referred to each other exclusively as President CAF and President JCH and the JC had stuck. The next time they had one of their play dates, she had called him JC until it was just Jace and Jacey when she wanted to annoy him. The name became his. By then he knew a little bit of the story, about being named by the bad guy who had taken him from his family and named him after his own dead son. He liked Jace better.
The play dates were rare and something Jace looked forward to the way other children looked forward to birthdays. The first one had been when he was five. They had just moved into the attic apartment where he had his own room that Tessa had let him paint bright yellow like sunshine and his hair. He had a bike and a cat that didn't scratch and a bookshelf full of picture books and a new one that he was just starting to fill up with the chapter books he was learning to read. Their landlady was from China and Jace spoke to her in the Mandarin Tessa had taught him and she told him he was Kě ài and gave him treats until Tessa made her stop.
"You will make him explode!" she had accused and Mrs. Wu had gone from giving him sweets to giving him whatever food she was cooking when he went by her window.
Jocelyn had come up the staircase past that window with Clary led by the hand and then had taken Jace aside for the most terrifying conversation of his young life while Tessa showed Clary the rooftop balcony that looked down on the backyard. Jace remembered her laughing and talking about the flowers.
Jocelyn had told him that Clary didn't know about warlocks or magic or shadowhunters and he wasn't allowed to say anything about it. She hadn't threatened him but there was something about the way she loomed over him with her face so dark and serious and her voice almost as cold as Tessa's angry voice that stayed with him. Jocelyn was scary.
He hadn't broken his promise to keep the secret and Jocelyn had decided that the play dates were safe enough to happen regularly. The adults, who Clary just referred to collectively as The Moms though Jace had tried to explain that Tessa wasn't his mother, sat out on the balcony with coffee and talked while they played inside. Sometimes they went to the park or even someplace exciting like Coney Island.
Clary taught him the mundane things she learned in school, not just presidents but fractions and the water cycle and how to blend colours of paint until you could paint an entire sunset with only three colours. He taught her bits of Chinese and French and read her poetry and sometimes, when Jocelyn was out on the balcony and they were back in his room where he was sure they wouldn't be heard, he told her about warlocks and faeries and werewolves and Tessa's vampire friend with the dyed pink hair. Clary thought they were all stories but Jace made her promise her to keep it a secret and as Jocelyn never stopped the visits or growled at him in that low scary voice again, he knew that she had kept it.
By fifteen, Jace had a little pack of friends, all Downworlders, none of whom knew he was actually Nephilim. He ran through the city with werewolves and the odd faerie. He learned how to ride motorcycles with vampires and knew the tangled politics of clans the way normal teenagers understood their high school cliques. He was always the youngest person in the room. Usually by decades, sometimes by centuries.
He was beautiful and unusual, a sighted mundane most of them assumed but under the protection of the High Warlock of Brooklyn and the Upper East Side vampires. He was introducing himself as Jace by then and even Tessa called him by the nickname unless she was annoyed with him or was being very serious.
He fell in love and it fell apart, over and over and over again but he just kept throwing himself into relationships. Tessa spoke of love like it was elemental and essential. She told stories of her husband and the kind of love you might die for, the kind that made life worth living. Sometimes, after he had come for a visit, she told him stories of Brother Zachariah when he had been a boy with silver hair and a violin and how a piece of her heart belonged to him too.
Wanting some inch of that, some piece of a love like that, Jace threw his heart out there and each time it back battered. It was never the kind of love he wanted. Never that kind of love that he could imagine still feeling after they'd become a Silent Brother and lost their ability to speak and feel. His first kiss was with a faerie girl Kylie and his first break up was with her as well. His string of break ups kept getting longer after that.
His almost first kiss, the one that wasn't actually a kiss but lingered in the back of his mind like a phantom pain, had been with Clary. Thirteen and silly, on the rickety stairs to that outside balcony, outside Mrs. Wu's kitchen window. Clary had been telling him about playing spin the bottle at a friend's birthday party. He had thought the game was dumb and declared that if you wanted to kiss someone you'd probably have more luck if you just asked.
"Do you think so?" Clary had asked. This was before he had hit the growth spurt that would push him from a scrawny child to over six feet in what had felt like the blink of an eye. He'd only been a little taller than her then.
"It's better than spinning a piece of garbage around and hoping for the best," he had said with a laugh. Mundies were weird. Maybe he was weirder. He was after all being raised by his ancestor who looked like a college student, sometimes went whole days speaking in demon languages because he had fallen behind in his studies and had recently taught him how to do balance runs on the playground equipment after midnight.
"What if I said I wanted to kiss you?" Clary had said and he had laughed but she hadn't been joking. He didn't get to find out what kissing Clarissa Fray was like. Jocelyn came down the steps just as their faces got close to it and had thrown a fit.
"Joss," Tessa had said in that inarguable voice from behind her as Jace pushed his back against the railing and pretended Clary's mother didn't still terrify him from that one run in when he was five. Clary had crossed her arms and glared. Jocelyn had stopped talking and looked back at Tessa and then she had stormed off. Taking Clary with her.
He hadn't seen her since and all of Tessa's explanations for why he couldn't just go visit or call her were less than what he wanted. He had finally yelled something about how unfair and how dare she try to control him like this and why wasn't he allowed to have friends like other kids, like normal kids.
And that had been the night she had sat him down and told him the entire story. A story that included Clary's dead brother and his dead parents and an organization led by a zealot who had failed to start a war. She had told him everything and when it was over he'd done something he hadn't done since he was little, he put his head on her knee and closed his eyes and let himself cry over people he'd never met.
At sixteen, Jace was sitting with a pack of vampires on the roof of an abandoned building down near the Pandemonium Club when he first seen the Shadowhunters. There were just two of them, a hunting pair and Jace wondered if they were parabatai, the boy taller than the girl but they both wore gear and had hair like ink. Jace wanted gear, wanted to hold seraph blades in his hand, wanted to read the codex and not just hear stories from it. He wanted a stele and runes and to be a warrior.
"Baby Lightwoods," Wilkes said leaning forward to watch them come up the street. He said it like it was a dirty word and Jace came to sit on the edge of the roof beside him.
"Mommy and Daddy Lightwood were Circle members you know, they nearly killed me once way back when you were still just a kinky itch in someone's pants," Wilkes said to Jace.
"That was disgusting, thank you," Jace told him. Tessa knew about the East Side vamps and his friends up there but these were Hotel Dumort vampires and they were a grungier crowd. Jace was here because of a girl, he was always in a bad crowd because of a girl but this one was beautiful with raven hair and a delicate face and she grinned at him with sharp teeth when he stared at her. So Jace was on a rooftop with her friends, watching Mundies come in and out of clubs and making snide comments.
He had a sudden compulsive desire to meet them, the Shadowhunter kids. They might have played together if the world had been different. The Lightwoods and the Herondales were an old alliance. Stephen had known Maryse and Robert. Outside of Clary and Jocelyn the only Shadowhunters Jace knew were Zachariah and Tessa and neither of them really counted. He left the vamps on the roof, claiming he had received a text from Tessa and needed to leave immediately, and had ran down the stairs.
He lost them that night. Wandered the streets but never found them again. He gave up and went to do a thing he knew was rude. Tessa had explained it to him like that, "When someone asks you to leave them alone, chasing after them isn't right or fair. Give them their space, respect it. Sometimes friendships end Cariad, even when we don't want them to."
But his poor judgment got the better of him sometimes and he went to go and look at the house. Stalker, his brain whispered but he stared up at it nonetheless. A brownstone and Clary's apartment was on the second floor. Clary and her new best friend sometimes sat on the stoop and talked. The boy with the brown hair and the glasses who she smiled at and probably drew pictures of like she used to draw pictures of him while he posed as ridiculously as possible. It was late and the lights were all out but he lingered and let the nostalgia wash over him.
It was a year later before he actually met Isabelle and Alec Lightwood. He was angry and jaded after another breakup, this time with a mundane girl who had freaked out on him for being too secretive and called him a "fucking weirdo" which had set him off and he had yelled back and as much as he was relieved it was over, it felt like further proof that he was never going to find anyone.
So he went to the club to dance until he forgot that he was the freak boy who wasn't a mundane, wasn't a Shadowhunter, wasn't a warlock, wasn't anything. He drank a little too. The bar didn't serve underage but there were ways around that if you were raised by a warlock and were persistent enough. He didn't care if the booze was technically stolen or if he was just going to end up throwing up in an alley. It took the edge off being Jonathan Christopher Herondale for a little while.
He wasn't drunk yet when he saw the blue haired boy follow the girl in white into a back room. He snuck in after them. He knew the signs, knew when someone was being hunted. Tessa hadn't just taught him languages and poetry. His training was the same course of study Shadowhunter children were taught in Institutes. Maybe a little bit archaic but thorough and peppered with things warlocks didn't tell the Clave. Jace knew what he was looking at. The boy with the blue hair wasn't human and whatever he was wasn't about to do something nice. Jace kept a long runed blade in his boot and he had it in hand as he crept into the room.
The scene inside the room surprised him. The girl in white wasn't a victim. These were the Lightwood children he had seen from a distance over a year before. Not children at all and glorious in their runes, with their seraph blades glinting. They were too busy binding back the demon to notice him but only moments after he made it into the room, someone burst in behind him, calling his name.
"Jace!" she said and then she saw what was going on. The two Shadowhunters turned towards her and the boy narrowed his eyes. Clary looked right at them. It shouldn't have been possible. Clary had no sight and that was why she couldn't be allowed to know about Downworld was something Jocelyn had told him during that very first play date when they'd been kindergarteners. But Clary stared at the Lightwoods with wide confused eyes.
"What is this?" the boy asked.
The demon took the distraction and ripped through the restraints and tore towards her. It bypassed the Shadowhunters and headed for the weakest link in the room: the unarmed girl in the doorway. Jace moved fast. He slashed out with a knife he had never actually used in a real battle and sliced through the thing's neck as it's lips skinned back and a nest of spinning teeth emerged.
Ichor splattered, Clary screamed the thing was disintegrating before it hit the ground.
"Jace?" Clary said to him in utter disbelief.
"Who the hell are you?" came from the Shadowhunter boy behind him, his voice even angrier.
"Just helping," Jace said and the man was advancing on them. He didn't seem so young and interesting when he looked that angry but Jace didn't stand down. The bastard was even taller than he was and was trying to use that to be intimidating. Jace reached out and wiped his blade on the sleeve of the Shadowhunter's gear. He skinned back his lips in disgust and started to say something but Jace was already moving.
"Bye then," he said and he grabbed Clary by the elbow and pulled her hard back into the crowd. They would be coming after him as soon as they cleaned up the mess in the storage room so mundies didn't find it. He had maybe two minutes. Clary was yelling at him. Demanding answers, demanding to know where he had been for the last three years. He caught sight of her stupid mundane friend and dragged her over to him.
"Just ignore that this every happened," Jace said to him.
"Like you ignored that I ever existed, that we were ever friends?" she said. "You moved and left and never so much as sent a postcard."
"I didn't move, your mother told us we weren't ever to speak to you ever again," Jace said and glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the Lightwoods leaving the storage room, "I gotta go."
And then he did. He left her yelling after him with her befuddled new best friend and disappeared off into the crowd. He took the back exits and found Wilkes' flying motorbike at the back of the club. He sent Wilkes an apologetic text and then kicked it up into the air and took off.
The Lightwoods had been Circle members and Tessa didn't trust them. He didn't know if their children were still loyal to Valentine but he did know if Valentine ever found him it would be the end of everything. How many a gold eyed Shadowhunter boys raised outside the Clave could there be? He shouldn't have risked letting them see him. If the Lightwoods found him, then the Lightwoods found Tessa and eventually they would find Jocelyn and Clary as well.
So he left before any of that could happen.
Back home, he didn't tell Tessa. He didn't lie to her. He wasn't sure he could, not because of magic, he just didn't think it was a possibility. Like lying to her would make him explode with guilt. He went into his room and she knocked on his door and handed him a cup of tea with raised eyebrows. He was taller than her and to strangers in the street they looked more like a couple than a parent and child. But she looked at him with what Clary had once called "mom face" and he caved instantly.
"I saw Clary at a dance club," he said, "She was mad."
"Mad?" Tessa asked. She was self contained. He needed her, she was his only family, his mother and father and grandmother and favourite aunt all rolled into one person. He wasn't sure it went both ways. He never doubted that he was loved but he wanted to be needed. He wasn't sure Tessa needed him.
"Her mom said we had moved and she thought I was an asshole for not returning her messages," Jace said leaning against the door frame of his room with the cup of tea held in both hands. It was a mug he had chosen when they'd gone on vacation to London. It had a picture of the London Bridge being stomped by Godzilla on the side. He said, "She never sent any messages."
Tessa pursed her lips and crossed her arms. She looked uncomfortable and young. Then she told him that Jocelyn had blocked their number and had probably done the same with the email addresses that Jace had once used to send Clary messages. He'd just assumed they had been ignored.
"She was your friend," Jace said surprised by the strength of his own anger.
"She's scared for her daughter," Tessa said, "Fear makes people impulsive and love makes you do impossible things."
Late that night, Jace flipped open the laptop in the corner of his room and created a new email. StillJCH , he called it and he used it to send a message to an email he had long abandoned as silent and dead.
The next morning there was a response an order for him to meet her at a coffee shop called Java Jones. He buzzed from the moment he read it. He found the ichor had eaten through the finish on his boots, making them look splattered in bleach. He pulled them on with a feeling somewhere between disbelief and glee. He had killed a demon and Clary didn't hate him.
"Go change," Tessa said when he came out of his room nervous and excited at far too early.
"What? Why?" he said.
"There are holes in those jeans, one does not go to date wearing jeans with holes," Tessa said.
"It's not a date," Jace said.
"No, of course not, it's a scheduled argument with your childhood sweetheart," Tessa said and Jace started to argue again. This is why he had thought she knew everything when he was younger. She cut him off with a smile and a raised finger, "It has been years, Jonathan and you are not a little boy any more. Go there dressed like a man, argue like children and then tell her the truth. Whatever the truth. No one likes to be lied to, even if it might protect them from harsher truths."
"Jocelyn might come here and kill us both if she finds out," Jace said.
"Jocelyn has been treating a young woman like a stupid infant," Tessa said. "She can come and scream at me about the dangers of the truth if she so desires but I too spent my entire childhood believing I was perfectly normal to wake up and discover I was something else. I would have rather have had a friend to tell me. You two were friends and if you want to be again, go in there prepared to tell the truth. Clary isn't a baby anymore."
And so Jace had gone in his nice jeans and a teeshirt that Tessa agreed was acceptable. He had been expecting Clary alone and instead had found her and the brown haired boy sitting at a table in Java Jones. He almost turned and left but Clary made eye contact and he lost the will to walk away. He slipped into the seat across from them and tried for the cold and powerful expression Tessa used when negotiating warlock deals.
"Do you have a sword with you right now?" the friend asked.
"Yes," Jace said. It was true. He wore a leather jacket that covered the short sword scabbard on his back as well as the knives in his boots. Actually meeting a demon had scared him more than he was willing to admit to anyone but he wasn't going out unarmed ever again. He didn't say any of that. He might have to Clary but not to the eager mundane.
Introductions were made and Simon started in with stupid questions. Truly stupid and Jace just watched him as he talked. He tried to calculate the chances of pulling Clary away, of talking to her and only her about the important parts, about the parts that weren't meant for obnoxious mundanes. Before Jace could even begin to sort out what the answers were, Clary's phone rang. She picked it up and read the screen and then put it back down. It rang again. She did the exact same thing. Lift, read, glare, face down.
"Jealous boyfriend?" Jace asked and it came out almost mean. This wasn't going as he had imagined it and he didn't know how to turn it around.
"Jealous mother," she said.
On the third time that the ringer interrupted before Jace could say anything important, she picked up the phone stomped outside. Jace was left sitting with Simon who caved to his stony unfriendliness and went to go order a muffin. Jace watched him leave and then went after Clary.
He found her screaming at her phone in the alley around the corner. She nearly crumpled to her knees and Jace caught her shoulders. It wasn't the anger he had expected, it was panic. Screaming into the phone for her mother but when she looked at the screen in shaking hands, it blinked a message about how the call had been ended. She looked up from the blinking screen at him.
Clary's familiar eyes and familiar hair but she had gone from a little girl to a young woman in the intervening four years since he'd seen her last and he lost what he was going to say as he stared at her. She didn't say anything. She turned and pulled away from him and started to run. A dead run, her shoulder bag slapping against her thigh as she pounded down the street in battered running shoes. Jace ran after her.
She hit her front door and found it hanging open. Jace tried to keep her outside, tried to refuse to let her in when there could be dangers in there but she was Clary and she didn't listen.
So he handed her the sword instead. It was short enough that even without training she could wield it. He looked at her with both his daggers in hand and then stepped away from the door. Letting her lead was a bad idea but she flat out refused to follow so he did the only thing he could, he stayed close and watched her back.
They found an empty apartment. Tossed and destroyed, pictures shredded in their frames, drawers upturned and emptied. Clary held her borrowed blade so tightly her knuckles were white. Jace touched her back as they moved toward the bedrooms and the reminder she wasn't alone calmed her just a little bit. They crept through the apartment, destroyed empty room by destroyed empty room. Jace started to think they were alone when he heard the slip and rasp of scales against wood.
When the ravener came for them, hissing out, "Girl flesh," from a mouth not intended for speech, Clary hacked at it. She had finally let him lead and it came at her from behind, out of a closet they hadn't yet opened. Artless but furious, Clary got the blade in below its scales and pushed until it shrieked. Jace hit it higher, and whether it was the evisceration or the strike to its heart that killed it didn't matter. It exploded into a shower of ichor that landed on Clary where she had been knocked to the ground. She turned and vomited and then pushed herself up on shaking legs.
Jace caught her arm and she turned to him, not scared but almost as angry as she had been at the demon. Blazing and beautiful and splattered with gore. Here was the little girl who had given him a name, who had kept just one of his feet grounded in the mundane, who had drawn him pictures and their games and been his best friend since his earliest memories. She looked at him with a warrior's fire in her eyes and he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why he'd never been able to fall in love with someone else.
"I want to know what is going on," she said in a shaky voice.
"I'll tell you everything," he said.
"I need to find my mother," she said.
"I'll help you do that too," he said, "I will not leave you again. Let's go somewhere safe and I'll tell you the entire story. We're in this together you and I, we always have been. "