Notes: another piece on Jessie because I (clearly) want her to have a halfway happy ending.
Disclaimer: neither the characters nor the title (taken from Alana Grace's Black Roses Red) is mine.
How Long Must I Hold My Breath
The day of her release a woman with a bun like iron shoves a bundle into Jessamine's arms.
"Here you are," says the woman, already stepping away. "You'll find some money, a few articles of clothing. You'll find several train tickets enclosed as well." Then she smiles, lightening the wrinkles on her face. "The Clave is not entirely unkind, Jessamine Lovelace."
And Jessamine, eyes watering in the beaming light, holds onto to the bundle with fingers whitened from the dark and thin from starvation.
(She had thought trying to kill herself would be like freedom, but the Brothers are healers. They knew.)
She blinks, the red imprints of buildings seared onto the backs of her eyelids, and when she opens her eyes again the woman has gone and Jessamine is alone in a flowing London street. Her steps are slow, delicately placed: the feel of walking is one she has almost forgotten, and the pressure of her weight sends needles lancing through her feet. By the time she reaches the train station dusk is about to fall and the shadows leer at her from corners.
The train for France leaves sooner than the rest, so she hands over her ticket to a curious-looking boy and clambers aboard. She picks an empty compartment toward the back, leans her head against the window, and puts her feet up on the seat across her. Her bundle sits in her lap, heavily wrapped and reminding her of the weight of a child.
As the train begins to move the last of the sunlight glints off her cracked wedding ring.
Jessamine looks down at it, then pulls it off her finger and into the fold between her seat and the next.
No one told her what to do, or what she could do, so Jessamine wanders around cities and towns. She finds Institutes and falls into a warlock nest, but otherwise she stays well on the mundane path, grabbing jobs to fill her frayed purse. Though her family money is still hers and easy enough to obtain, there is something liberating about watching grimy, well-used coins fall into her open hands.
She tries not to stay in the same place for long; people start to become familiar, her name is remembered, and she did not come here out of a want for a new family. Jessamine lives out of a bag purchased early in her trip and while there are people who side-eye a girl like her travelling alone, most look over her stringy hair and threadbare clothes. Friends are made and left behind, and she slowly stops seeing every blond, blue-eyed boy as one who died.
When she has some meat on her bones and some color back on her face, a boy asks her to dance. The steps are as foreign as the town's name, but Jessamine stumbles along and the boy laughs, showing her how. He reminds her of Jem – and it is this thought that sends her to the Romanian Institute the next morning.
She has picked up enough of the language to ask her question, and the head of the Institute eventually consents to send a letter. He offers her a room to stay in and for the next fortnight she goes from twirling around a new, normal parasol to watching the Shadowhunters train the younger recruits. They ask her if she would like to join and Jessamine, thinking of Charlotte and Henry's attempts to persuade her, agrees.
Her skill is nonexistent and children younger than her laugh when she drops her knife. But there is a – a familiarity behind each movement, something that reminds her of her mother and bedtime stories whispered between her father's calls for the lights to be dimmed.
The letter arrives during breakfast on her fifteenth day and the head passes it to her without so much as a look in her direction. He does not care much for her, she knows: Jessamine's shame has been well-recounted among the Shadowhunters.
She thanks them, packs her bag again, and does not open the letter until she is on a train going east. The words inside are simple and to the point: Jem is alive, married to Tessa; Henry and Charlotte have welcomed a son; Gideon and Sophie are engaged; Will's sister is in Idris, training; and Will himself is travelling, or so Jem says.
Jessamine reads the letter again and again and turns it over, vaguely hoping that there is something on the back. There's nothing, of course; she is little more than a traitor and for all that Charlotte is a mother and kind, she does not forget easily. But the letter still does what Jessamine had wanted, and she rests with a faint smile that night, knowing that her almost-family is well.
(In the very beginning – just after France – she turned around for London. She walked up the steps, put her hands on the doors, and found them burned within moments.)
Moscow is cold and cramped and Will laughs with the drunks until Jessamine's ears bleed.
"I wanted to see you again," he said to her after appearing in her doorway. "Curiosity, and all that."
He has been in Russia for a while now and he takes her to his favorite haunts, grinning all the while. She had thought that Jem's marriage to Tessa – Tessa's marriage to Jem – would have changed him, made Will bitter to the world and sarcastic like the boy she remembers.
But Will acts like a boy his age should, and at the end of the week he tells her that the north is beautiful.
"You should see it," he says with a wink. Then he presses a folded up paper into her hands, hugs her once, and leaves.
The paper is an explanation that Jessie reads by candlelight. It is the story of a boy cursed and a boy in love with his brother's girl, at the bottom of the page the story tapers off with: The boy ventured off to claim a stake in the world, and he makes sure to write every now and then. He isn't very happy – but he thinks in time he'll be able to come home smiling.
His words are ruined when she sobs, hands over her mouth and water leaking down her face. She cries partly for Will, and she cries partly for herself.
(Charlotte visited her just once during her imprisonment, and it was to murmur: "He's dead, Jessie." She never did cry properly for her husband – or for Thomas.)
Later – much, much later, when her oldest son is sitting by her knee hoping for a story – she comes to realize that there was more in Will's story. A memory, really, of a girl who fell in love too quickly, whose family sent her away for her own good, and who still waits to see her again.
Jessie digs around for her bag. She can't find it – too many years, she supposes – and makes do with one of her husband's. Bemused, he takes her to the station with their brood of three children who scream and nag at one another. The oldest wants to come with her, and Jessie laughs at her daughter's bold green eyes.
"Next time," she says, dropping a kiss onto her brown hair. The girl shies away, scowling, thinking herself too old for affection. Jessie reaches over and takes the youngest from her husband's arms; the boy looks up at her with wide eyes that start to glance around everywhere.
"I'll be back soon," she promises, and her husband nods. He understands – London had been his home before he left it all for a chance at a new name – and he waves at her when she sits, once again, in a train with the weight of a child on her lap.
(When she reaches her old home, she goes up the steps without a thought and the doors spring open at her touch.)