So...I basically wrote this story in the course of two days, because I was what you might call "obsessed" with the idea (just a tad) after re-reading TID. When re-reading the series, I was happy to see that I still got major feels in all the right places, and...well, this is basically what I came up with. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please consider reading my other TID story, "Rose In Bloom". Enjoy, and thank you in advance!

June 22, 1938

A whole year. It had been a whole year. How had it already been a whole year?

When it had finally happened, when the time had come, she had been there for it, had waited as the hours dragged by, sluggish and painful. She had been there when the moment finally came, when the moment passed in a frustratingly unceremonious instant.

Still, she had been there.

Now, a whole year later, as she kept reminding herself, she was back to this place, this place where so much misery was buried, both figuratively and literally. She had never quite understood why people would ever want to come back, why they would ever want to have to experience the excruciating pain all over again. It had taken enough out of her to show up the first time, and she hadn't thought she would ever be able to live through that kind of torture again.

And yet here she was anyway.

She wove carefully through the maze of marble and monuments, finding herself compelled to place a hand on each grave she passed, but she was afraid to, for some strange reason. Don't be silly, she scolded herself mentally. They're dead. They can't hurt you. The dead can't hurt you. She silently repeated the words that the Silent Brother - not Jem, not Brother Zachariah - had told her. The dead can't hurt you.

What a lie that was.

Tessa's breath had already been uneven as she had walked up the hill, retracing her steps with some difficulty, but now, as she reached the top and arrived at the little grove of trees surrounding her, her breath caught in her throat, sticking there, and she felt her heart stop.

There it was. In the same place it had been last year, not that she had expected it to not be there. It was just that seeing the round curve of that familiar headstone made everything so much more real, and once again, reality hit her, like a harsh slap in the face.

She didn't even realize that she had run to the tombstone until she found herself there a moment later, collapsing onto the ground in a heap and using the marker to support her. She paid no attention to the grass that clung to her dress, staining it and dampening it with the morning dew. Her dress was probably ruined, but she didn't care.

The words etched into the marble headstone seemed to jump out at her, mocking her misery as she read them:

In memory of:

William Owen Herondale

A faithful husband

And a loving father

Born 28 January 1861

Died 22 June 1937

Age 76

Everything that had happened in the past year came back to her in a flash flood, and her body was inundated with emotions too painful. Her hurt welled up until it was too much, and she couldn't repress the flood of tears any longer. The dam broke, and so did her heart, all over again. Uncontrollable sobs rocked her body, shaking her slight frame that had become so much thinner and neglected since last summer.

"Stop!" she cried out, to nothing, anything, everything. "Make it stop," she pleaded in a whisper.

Her sobs subsided and she allowed air to once again flow through her lungs again, though she struggled to move past the ragged breaths and random coughs. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the marble of the headstone, surprised that the surface was so cool on such a warm summer day.

For an hour or so, maybe two, maybe three even, she sat there, her arms loosely wrapped around the base of the tombstone, her frame bent over in a sheltering embrace of the stone which her head rested on. Once or twice she drifted off to sleep, the sunlight of the afternoon warming the backs of her eyelids. She was woken only when a flurry of birds chirped and chattered to each other from their staggered branches, and their sweet songs filled her ears. The musicality of their voices felt wrong, felt unfair for anyone or anything in the world to be happy when her happiness, the source where all of her joy stemmed from, was gone. Forever.

June 22, 1939

Surely, it could not have been two whole years. My, how the time flew when one was not having fun.

Last year had been a period of intense mourning, in which she had woken up every morning - alone, of course - in a fit of unsubsiding tears, her silk sheets soaked with a cold sweat. And each day, she had performed the same monotonous task of pulling of the bed sheets and washing them in ice water in a desperate attempt to rinse away the sweat, the blood, the tears.

But despite the heart-wrenching pain that she had been in each and every day, at least she had been surrounded by people at all times. That was one thing that had helped her through her mourning of her husband. People, it somehow seemed, had softened the immense blow that came when the one dearest to you passed away. Hoards of friends and family members had seemed to follow her everywhere, and though she had pretended to be annoyed by it, in reality she had been everlastingly grateful towards them all: Sophie, Cecily, Gabriel, Magnus. Her friends had been there for her, even when most were too old and withered to properly support her when she would cry out and her body would be rocked by sobs that shook her to the core. Age, it seemed, had no hold on friendship.

This year was different.

Unlike last year, this past year had been a lonely one for her, in which few people had visited her, and she had often been left to face her self-made isolation. It was if people swarmed you with love and support the first year that someone close to you died, promising to never leave you alone, but the very next year, they had decided that certainly you must be alright. Tessa wasn't an expert on heart surgery by any means, but she was fairly sure that when someone had their heart ripped into a million pieces and then stabbed with a poisoned blade, it took only slightly longer than 12 months for that wound to heal.

But as she climbed the hill in the cemetery, she knew she was just being bitter. She supposed she couldn't blame her friends and family too much though; after all, they did have lives aside from taking care of each and every need of hers. And besides, she was much more agile than the lot of them anyway, so it wasn't as if she shouldn't be the one taking care of them instead. Gabriel, it seemed, had not been too well in the past year, and though she had visited him and Cecily and their children and grandchildren on a few occasions, she had spent the majority of her time locked away in her room, the curtains drawn tight against the afternoon sun so that not even one speck of light managed to evade its way into her bitter cave of grief and despair. There was rarely any sound, save for the radio that she sometimes turned on just out of curiosity. She had heard recent tales of a man named Adolf Hitler, who seemed to steadily be conquering and reclaiming areas surrounding his country of Germany. Oddly, enough it was this very topic that she chose to bring up when she first arrived at the grave on that brisk morning in June, for the third time ever.

"I hear murmurs of war," she began simply, "from the East." She paused, for no particular reason other than to gather her thoughts. "A man named Hitler, it seems, is building an army, and he seems quite intent on gaining more power with each bit of land he conquers." She knelt down, running her gloved hands over the smooth marble and drew in a breath. "I worry for them, Will. The mundanes. This man reminds me too much of Mortmain - I can not even remember what his first name was, if you can believe it. They appear to share a love of power, of an army that gives them that power. I remember that horrid war with those automatons, very clearly, as I'm sure you would if...if..." She let the words fall off of her tongue, not able to bring herself to utter them.

If you were still alive.

Although no one was around, she did her best to blink back any tears and to conceal any tremor in her voice as she continued. "Many of the mundanes say that war is avoidable, that they can appease this man by giving him more land, but I can feel the tension building, and I fear that war is not avoidable this time."

Suddenly, her mouth quirked up in an odd grin, one she knew that Will would have put on her face in the past. "Then again, I have been wrong before, haven't I?"

If she expected an answer, she received none, though the whistling of the wind through the branches of the oak trees that grew in abundance here was enough to allow the silly smile on her face to linger a moment longer than it may have otherwise.

"I have been quite lonely," she admitted to her late husband's headstone. It was possibly the first time that she had forced herself to truly acknowledge the fact, though she was sure that others near to her had noticed it for quite some time. Even she may have realized it in some subtle way, though only subconsciously.

"Everyone has been away, you see," she explained with the natural tone of one talking to a friend they had just seen in the local pub. "James has just become a grandfather, if you can believe it. Owen and Lydia had a little boy named Marcus, only a few weeks ago, so they have mainly kept to themselves, as you can imagine. But can you believe it? Us - I mean, me - a great-grandmother?! Though, I'll admit, I haven't even seen him yet... But I'm sure he's perfectly healthy, or else I would have heard otherwise, certainly," she affirmed with a nod before continuing. "And Lucie, oh, Will, you should just see Lucie! She and Jesse have been traveling all over the world, going on terribly exciting adventures together, just the two of them. I was surprised at first, because Lucie has always been the more practical of our children, as I'm sure you'd agree. But I quite like the idea of it. It all sounds very romantic, if you ask me, though I know you were never very fond of Jesse, were you, Will?" she said with a smug smile as she thought of the memories, the endless silly fights between the families.

"Meanwhile," she said with a slight frown, "Cecily and Gabriel have mostly kept to themselves. Gabriel... Gabriel hasn't been doing very well lately. Cecily's been by his side every waking minute, and Sophie there to comfort her. As for me... Well, I can't say I've been there as often as I would've liked. I've mostly kept to myself, a fact I'm not too proud of."

She cleared her throat, not wanting to relive the memories of the past year, spent alone in self-ordered solitary confinement. Some memories were just too unpleasant to bring up.

"I'm not sure quite what it is that's made him so ill. It could be some silly mundane disease, or maybe a demon that he killed recently... Though that doesn't quite sound true, as he's always been very skilled. Not as skilled as you though, of course," she admitted with a grin, her head inclined towards the headstone. The wind bounced off of the curved shape unevenly, so it sounded like the faint sound of laughter was being carried on the breeze, distantly. Tessa felt her breath hitch in her throat.

"Though I do suppose... I do suppose it could just be old age. After all, he is...79. By the Angel," she breathed. "Can he really be so old?"

She felt herself being weighed by morbid thoughts of everyone she had ever loved, dying and moving on to the next life while she herself would be chained to this life, forced to appear young forever when in reality she would want nothing more than to just die and rejoin her loved ones.

No, Tessa, she reprimanded herself. It's not healthy to think of such things. Remember what Magnus said.

"Oh!" she cried suddenly. "And speaking of Magnus" - though she hadn't been, at least out loud - "Magnus has moved to Paris. He's been there for a month or so. He claims that he wants to start somewhere new, somewhere fresh and 'to begin again', but I think he really just wants to be safe from the possible-upcoming war, the scaredy-cat," she said with a light chuckle. "As a matter of fact, he wants me to join him there. He says it will be good for me, though by the Angel I see no reason why it would be." She gulped slowly. "It will be quite some time before any place away from London...away from you, feels like home to me."

June 22, 1946

When she re-entered that cemetery for the first time in seven years, it was difficult to distinguish which areas bore buried folk underneath the soil, and which areas were merely mounds of dirt the size of mountains. Every step she took, she found her feet treading upon broken bits of tombstones and flower vases, which had undoubtedly been left there as loving decoration by close friends and family members of the dead. She even spied a teddy bear resting under one heap of rubble near a dishearteningly small grave meant for a child, the toy's body blown to bits and its stuffing pouring from a gaping hole in its side. It was a horrible reminder of the horrors that people had experienced over the past few years, a series of nightmares which had steadily become a dreadful reality.

Truly, it broke Tessa's heart to see the cemetery in such a condition, for at this point enough of her heart had been pieced back together for her to actually feel again, though she suspected that the stitches keeping it in one piece would never truly make it as strong as it once had been. She recalled what he had said to her once, a year or two ago, when the two had been living in an apartment together in Paris:

"The first one is always the hardest," he'd told her soothingly.

"The first what?" she asked in return.

"The first one you love who dies. It gets easier, after."

She still wasn't sure how true that was, or if she ever would actually love another like she had loved Will. He had been her husband, her soul mate, her best friend. But, it seemed, life truly did go on, and Tessa's life was no exception, nor were the hundreds, thousands, and millions of other people who had been stripped to the core by the tragedy that was the Second Great War.

She had just condemned herself to the knowledge that it wasn't here - surely, his headstone could not have been spared during the Blitz - when she spied a grove of trees on the top of a steep hill. The hill itself was much altered and hardly recognizable, as before it had been coated in a sea of lush grass, and now it was reduced to a barren incline, the craters in its face making it look more like a gaping wound than anything else. But the trees... those, she could still recognize, despite the charred limbs and smoking trunks.

Could it really be there? She asked herself, not allowing herself to hope, as she trudged slowly up the hill. Don't get your hopes up, she told herself over and over again as she came to a stop.

"I don't believe it," Tessa said in a hushed whisper.

For her husband's grave was still there. It was still there.

"You always were a fighter, Will," she laughed, a sound that was a mix of disbelief, wonder, relief, and joy. Without hesitation, she raced over to the grave, inspecting it for damage.

The grass around and ontop of the place where he was buried had been burned to a crisp, so there was nothing there but dried soil, and a disarray of twigs and branches lay scattered across the area as well. The headstone itself had suffered a blow: a big chunk of it had been scooped from the upper right corner, so that one portion of the extensive message engraved in the marble now read "a faithful hus_ and a loving fat_."

Tessa may have laughed at the truncated message, knowing that Will would've laughed at it too, were it not for the immense relief that she felt at that moment. It was like the sudden unloading of a heavy burden that she didn't even know she'd been carrying since the moment she heard of the night air attacks on London a few years ago. So great was her joy that she fell to her knees, collapsing onto the headstone with her arms wrapped around it in a fond embrace; she didn't even stop to realize that exactly six years ago to the day, she had found herself in the exact same position of using the grave marker for support, though her heart had been on two different ends of the spectrum entirely.

"I'm sorry!" she cried in between sobs and gasps of air. She needed to stop, needed to breathe and collect herself before attempting to speak, but she had already uttered the trigger word, and there was no sense in trying to hold herself back. "I'm so sorry! I'm sorry that I haven't come for so long! The war... It forced me to travel to Paris, with Magnus, and then to New York. I came back as soon as I was sure that it was safe to, but it's been six years...Six years! How can I forgive myself? I wanted to come so badly - Will, you know I did - but it was that infernal war that kept me away from you!" she finally exploded; her face was red and she was breathing hard, but she didn't care. All she could think about was: "Ugh! Mundanes and their stupid wars!"

Suddenly, she was quiet. It was if all of the energy had been taken out of her, along with her anger towards the war and everyone involved with it.

"Then again," she went on, her voice unexpectedly soft and hushed in contrast to the shaking rage in her tone a moment ago. She even managed to let out a gentle chuckle, saying, "We really weren't much better at preventing wars, were we?"

Again, she was silent: she just turned her head away from her husband's grave and gazed out at the devastated cemetery below her. It looked more like a wasteland and victim of turmoil than a place where people came to visit those who had already made their final visit. She could've chosen to see anything in that cemetery, with a view like that on top of the high hill, but all she wanted to see, all she chose to see, was field off to her left, notable and distinguishable from the others not only by the fresh grass that flourished in abundance, but also because of the innumerable rows of fresh grave markers that also flourished in abundance there.

Tessa tried to count them from her vantage point, but gave up when she reached three hundred. Rows upon rows, columns upon columns, bodies upon bodies; all of them dead, and all dead from one battle around a year ago. There had been so many more battles like it, and so many more young men - and women, she acknowledged - that had died like them.

"Look, Will" she softly said to the headstone, absentmindedly running her fingers over the curved top: that was still preserved, thankfully. "Look," she said again, pointing this time, "at all of those graves. Under every single one of those crosses, or Stars of David, or marker of any kind, lies a body of a young boy. Most between the ages of 17 and 25, I'd wager. You were 17 when you first met me, do you remember that? Imagine: boys that age marching off to a field and knowing that they are going to die. I know that it's different for Nephilim - for Shadowhunters. You were all born with the likelihood of dying young, probably in battle. But those boys were not raised that way. They weren't born knowing how to fight; who even knows if they died knowing how to fight!"

She paused for a moment, allowing herself to take in the cool breeze drifting her way, on which was the faint scent of pine needles, though where that came from she had no clue; after all, all of the trees around here were practically reduced to crisps.

Musing thoughtfully, she tilted her head back. "I can't decide if it's beautiful, for they all died while defending their country and their people... Or if it's just sad. They will never have the chance to grow old. They will never have the chance to raise children, or to find the kind of love that we had." Instinctively when she said it, her hand went to her side to grasp Will's hand, and yet after a half a second of groping blind air, her memory returned to her as she was deposited back to reality.

Instead of trying to fight back the tears like she had the last time she'd visited his grave, Tessa allowed the salty droplets to trickle down her cheek, though she managed to smile at the same time. "I suppose," she went on, her voice thick with emotion, "that it only makes me so much more grateful for what the two of us had, and what I know I will always carry with me, wherever I go."

June 22, 2009

"William," she whispered, crouched low to the ground, "it's me. Tessa. I'm back. And I've brought someone with me this time! You'll never believe who it is," she added with a teasing laugh.

"So...do I just...?" a voice stage-whispered to her from behind.

She glanced backwards at the person and smiled with a simple nod, gesturing him over. "Come on," she said to him with a wave. "You don't have to act so frightened."

He nodded in understanding, though as he bent down beside her on the soft grass, there was a faint furrow to his brow, from anxiety or nerves or fear, Tessa didn't know.

"Um, how are you doing today?" he began, and she couldn't help but roll her eyes at his cringe-worthy formality.

"You don't have to talk like that you know," she said to him with a gentle thwack on his arm. "Just talk to him like you would any normal person. Like you used to talk to him," she said in a softer voice.

He glanced at her, a look of worry still plastered onto his face, before he took a deep breath and faced the grave once again.

"Hallo, Will," he said, greeting the gravesite of his friend like he had when they were younger; instantly, a smile lit up his face, and infectiously Tessa grinned at the way just saying his old friend's name brightened her husband in a way that only his parabatai had ever been able to do. "It's me. Jem."

When he paused to look over to her, she offered him both an encouraging nod and a warm smile, and he squeezed her hand lovingly in return before continuing.

"It's been a long time, hasn't it? A little over seventy years, I'd say..." He trailed off slowly, and he looked down at himself. Tessa was afraid that he had become embarrassed or shy, or just didn't want to do this at all, but her worries were set aside when he looked back up, a funny sort of smile on his face. "I look a lot different now. I'm - I'm not Brother Zachariah anymore. I don't have to wear a robe anymore, and I can actually talk out loud, which I never really got to do when you were around," he joked with a light laugh. "If you were here, I bet you wouldn't even recognize me. Tessa certainly didn't, the first time she saw me after...after I changed back."

As Jem chattered on about this and that, Tessa tilted her head back thoughtfully, allowing her mind to travel back to that day a year ago, when she had waited for Brother Zachariah like she had every year for the past several decades. Time had ticked by, and at last she had spotted a figure approaching her on Blackfriars Bridge, but instead of the Silent Brother she'd been expecting, she received a visitor that was like a blast out of the past: Jem. But not the Jem who had been wrapped in the black robes of the Silent Brothers, or the Jem who had been cursed by his dependency on yin fen, weakened and yet strengthened by it, but Jem, as he had been physically before she knew him and emotionally the same as always. He had been a person that was both entirely familiar and new to her, though they had wasted no time in wiping away anything uncertain or unfamiliar between them. Just like that, it had been like old times, only a million times better. They had spent every moment since then together, though Tessa had excused herself on a day in June last year to come to the cemetery by herself and speak with Will like she always did.

She almost hadn't come this year. It sounded silly to her own ears, now that she and Jem were here, but she had been afraid that the two of them being there together would affect her tradition of coming to the ceremony, that either Jem would be uncomfortable, or she wouldn't be able to talk openly and freely like she normally did, or - even sillier-sounding to herself now than ever - that Will would somehow be jealous or angry at the two of them. Truthfully, Tessa had been afraid that her old husband and her new husband would somehow clash, and that everything would travel in a downward spiral.

But then they had the wedding.

And everything was perfect. It had been on Blackfriars Bridge in late February, with all of their closest friends and family their to support them. Everything had run smoothly: the vows, the rings, the kiss.

After she and Jem had officially said their "I do's" and the ceremony portion of the wedding was over, Tessa had slipped away for a moment, heading towards the edge of the bridge.

Earlier that day, she had felt something - or someone - nearby, though she hadn't been sure. But as she'd stepped towards the edge, she could feel him there, watching, waiting. She'd smiled; she had been hoping he would be there that day, though she had often taught herself not to get her hopes up. This time though, it seemed, it had been okay to raise her hopes just a little bit.

"I know you're here," she'd whispered to Will, not sure where he was exactly, but certain that he could hear and see her, even if she couldn't hear or see him. "And he knows, too."

Before she left, she remembered telling him that someday that would all be together again. This, right here in the cemetery with Jem, may not have been the final moment that they were all waiting for, but she couldn't help thinking that it was good enough for now.

"Jem?" she asked hesitantly once he had finished saying what he needed to, and was silent.

"Yes, light of my life?" he replied with a loving smile.

"Would you mind if I'm alone with him for a moment? Just for a few moments," she added quickly.

"Of course! He never stood in between the two of us, and I don't intend to now." With a wink, he stood and strolled off, making his way down the hill - which was now covered in a lovely array of flowers - and towards the iron gate at the entrance to the cemetery.

As she turned towards the headstone of her husband - her first husband - she once again felt herself being pulled back by hesitation, though why, she wasn't sure. But she ignored the feeling, and leaned forward, speaking quietly.

"Will, I'll be honest with you: I almost didn't come here today." Admitting it to Will hurt as much as admitting it to herself.

"I was...afraid. Afraid that you would think lesser of me, or of Jem, or of the two of us being married. But then I thought back to the wedding on Blackfriars Bridge, and of the way I could feel you there. I could feel you smiling, could feel the peace you felt at the two of us finally being together, after so long, and it made me realize something.

"Do you remember what you once said to me Will? It was after that date that we went on - the one where you tried to court me so stiffly," she added with a laugh. "Afterwards, you slipped a note under my door. I still have it, though I've memorized the whole letter at this point. In it, you said something I have never forgotten, and I never will. You said:

You are not the last dream of my soul. You are the first dream, the only dream I ever was unable to stop myself from dreaming. You are the first dream of my soul, and from that dream I hope will come all other dreams, a lifetime's worth.

Tessa could feel the tears as they slid down her face, slick and smooth as snow tumbling down the face of a mountain during an avalanche. But for once, she welcomed the tears; they seemed to rejuvenate her, and give her the strength to keep speaking. So she did.

"Do you remember that?" she demanded, her voice hoarse. "No one had ever said anything so beautiful to me before, and they still haven't. But I wanted to let you know, Will, that although I couldn't put the same thoughts into words before, they were always there for you to read. All you had to do was re-read the note to yourself. Because it is you who is the first dream of my soul, Will. You were my first dream, my first kiss, my first love, and it is you who I was so thankful to grow old with. And from our love we did manage to produce a lifetime's worth of dreams, all of which were beautiful and wonderful.

"But it is just as you said, Will: You are not the last dream of my soul. You were the first, but not the last. Jem...Jem is my next dream, a dream made possible only by the love that you two shared for each other, and that you shared with me in return. The three of us are so much more than a love triangle, dear Will; we cannot be confined to a single, meager shape, because our love and strength and devotion to each other encompasses and entreats us all. So it is you who I should be thanking, William Herondale, for allowing me to have my first dream, but not stopping me from having others after you."

She stood slowly; she felt as if a massive weight had suddenly been lifted from her shoulders, as if she had been holding the sky on her back and someone had taken the load for her. She felt at peace, finally.

But before she left, she couldn't help but add one final thought:

"Will," she asked quietly, though there was no tremor or weakness in the way she said it, "Do you also remember the way you signed that letter? You said: 'With hope at last.'" She breathed out slowly. "Hope at last. You'll never know how much those three words mean to me, Will. At the time that you gave me the letter, I thought that it applied only to you and me, but I see now that it can apply to me and Jem as well. You really are something special, Will Herondale," she added, not able to keep herself from laughing.

She glanced down the hill behind her, at her husband Jem waiting for her by the gate. When he met her gaze, he waved at her with big, open arms, and she smiled: once at him, her new life, her new dream, and once at Will's headstone, her old life, her first dream.

And she walked down that hill, with hope in her heart at last.

And there you go. Thank you so much for reading. Please leave me a review letting me know what you thought of it, because I genuinely want to know. Feel free to follow and favorite as well, but most importantly, remember to have a great day, and to always carry hope in your heart. :)

Love,

~Princess Andromeda II