A while ago, I wrote a really abstract drabble fic called Arid August Morning about Changeling!Jem. Unfortunately, the idea refused to leave me, so I present to you the first chapter of what will hopefully be a decently long affair that actually makes sense, in contrast with my previous offerings.
This fic is an AU, obviously, and it starts just before the beginning of Clockwork Princess. Surprisingly, there aren't any spoilers for the last book, and probably won't be for a few chapters, so don't worry! Not sure if there'll be shipping yet, but if so, it'll be Gideon/Sophie and maybe Jem/Tessa. Don't worry about the random OC, she's just here to move the plot along.
Please give feedback, because I'm not sure whether to continue this or not and suggestions are always appreciated!
Enjoy!
Jiarenqu (佳人曲, The Beauty Song): Chapter One: Pewter Pilgrim
Běifāng yǒu jiārén, juéshì ér dúlì.
In the north there is a beauty; surpassing the world, she stands alone.
Yí gù qīng rén chéng, zài gù qīng rén guó.
A glance from her will overthrow a city; another glance will overthrow a nation.
Nìng bù zhī qīng chéng yǔ qīng guó.
One cannot know whether it will be a city or a nation that will be conquered.
Jiārén nán zài dé.
But it would be difficult to behold such a beauty again.
The faerie's shoe was tiny; the size of his index finger, wrought of silver and velveteen inlays the colour of well-aged wine. In the muted light of the dawn it seemed to tremble at his touch. He tucked it in his pocket.
He had found it on the street of the bridge as he paced his usual route. In fact, he had been finding fay artifacts everywhere; in a drawer beside his bed were more than a dozen hollowed-out acorns and a leaf painted with some sort of downworlder metal, shimmering green and powdery like old copper statues.
It had become clear that they were following him, leaving him offerings where they knew he could find them. It was not a good thing to be of interest to the fay, no matter how romantic the notion might have sounded. He cast his eyes to the sky and threw his arms out as if to ask, 'why me?' to whatever god was up there. There wasn't an answer, there never was, but it made him feel better just to know that he had tried.
Remnants of rain rose off the pavements as he walked further on. When he reached the Thames he leant against a lamppost and watched the mudlarks sift through the debris in search of things to sell.
"A penny for a shard of a Trojan cup, a penny for a pewter pilgrim," sighed a high, singsong voice behind him, causing him to jump. "An opium pipe will sell for a song, but a song won't last like the poppy plant does."
He turned to the sound. It was a young girl, maybe nine years old, with a shock of braided blue-black hair long enough to reach the back of her knees. She was wearing a dress far too elegant for that early-morning dockside London; all laurel green brocade and crinolines. She regarded him with pale blue eyes.
He was at a loss at what to say. "Are you lost?" he asked, finally, in what he hoped was a soothing voice. "What's your name?"
The girl smiled, and Jem was stunned at the childlike innocence she seemed to exude. She spoke, and her voice was confident and multifaceted, like the chiming of bells.
"I am Isolane," she said. "It is an honour."
"Where are your parents?"
"At court, with the queen."
Jem smiled at the child. "Oh, I see. You're a princess, are you?"
"Oh, no. I am simply a messenger."
She looked out at the mudlarks again, and then flickered her gaze back to him. She rested her chin on the heel of her hand and began to hum.
He knew the tune instantly. It was a song that his mother had once sung to him, years ago. The girl picked up on this recognition and laughed.
"In the north there is a beauty," she sang in Mandarin. He stepped back. "Surpassing the world, she stands alone."
"How do you–?"
She ignored him. "It is hard to be beautiful, is it not? So many things conspire to break you. It is best to have some ugliness in the blood. That is why the nephilim were made, you know. The angels were too unspoiled."
Unspoiled. It was an odd word to use. Unfortunately there were more pressing concerns. Jem scowled. "Very funny," he said. "Who are you, downworlder?"
She sighed and her glamour slipped away. It slid off her in a sickeningly fluid, decadent movement, like a silk dress falling away from a courtier's back. She was older looking, perhaps his age, and each lock of her braided hair was actually a dark, twisted vine, like the ivy you saw crawling up brick walls. Her complexion was paper white, face constructed like a porcelain doll. Her eyes lightened completely until there were no irises or pupils, just two blank orbs staring viewless into the dark. A wry lift of her blue-tinged lips revealed rows of sharp teeth like that of a shark.
Jem cautiously raised his cane. She laughed. "Peace, brother. I came not to fight," she cocked her head and appraised him as one did to chickens in a farmers' market. "I am shocked that you did not see through the glamour. It was weak. Perhaps the experiment was a little too successful."
"I'm no brother of yours, faerie. And what do you want from me? Why am I being watched?"
"I am an emissary of the Seelie," she replied. Then she frowned. ""But that is not for me to speak of, yet. Circumstances have changed. The spell is decaying earlier than we thought."
"Spell? What spell?"
"There is a warlock. He owes the fay a debt. You must go to him and tell him Isolane has sent you. He will know what to do."
"Listen, I don't know who you think I am, but–"
"His name is Magnus Bane. Do you know of him?"
"I do," he scrutinized the faerie girl. Although she had the body of someone not much younger than him it was likely that she had lived for hundreds of years. The thought disturbed him more than it usually did when he met immortals. "But what does he have to do with this?"
She grinned again, baring her macabre rows of razor-like teeth. "Patience," she replied. "Find Magnus Bane before it wears off. If you do not… Well. That is for you to find out."
She melted into the shadows.
After a few ponderous minutes in the darkness he began his trek back to the institute. He stopped at one point and lifted up his sleeve, observing the silvery scars left behind by the stele. He was a shadowhunter, a nephilim, and a bearer of marks that should ward off any fair folk enchantment.
That faerie girl was probably insane, muttering about pewter pilgrims and experiments and spells. She was probably on a drug herself, wasting away in a warlock den with a pack of werewolves. Addicted scum with nowhere to go.
Addicted scum like him.
These thoughts made him shudder, so instead he tried to cast his mind to Tessa, his fiancée. Those days just thinking of her could brighten his spirits and make him feel alive again. In just a few months, in December, they would be married, and all would be well.
But this time the sense of comfort associated with her eluded him. With a sigh he shook himself and picked up his pace.
Go find Magnus Bane, indeed. As if he would follow the advice of the fair folk. As if there were anything more wrong with him than the Yin Fen coursing through his veins.
When he arrived at the institute it was already morning. Charlotte hurried out to greet him.
"Jem," she said. "Where have you been? I was worried sick."
"Where's Will? And Tessa?"
"He's out, and Tessa is training, I think. Some of us are having a late breakfast now, if you'd like–"
"I'm not hungry, Charlotte. Thank you."
He cut around her and up the stairs, trying to ignore her stare burning into his back.
Once inside his room he took some yin fen and lay down on the bed. After a while he picked up his violin and his bow, but he couldn't bring himself to play.
He woke up in the middle of the night with a splitting headache. With a groan he shifted and winced as his violin clattered onto the floor. Groggily he felt for it below the bed and lifted it up, inspecting it in the dim light for damage. Nothing, thank God.
He could only vaguely remember the events of the day; he had come back in the morning, Tessa had come to visit him… He'd been crabby, and then pretended that he had a cold when she began to worry he was having one of his 'episodes'.
He found himself too awake to sleep again. He looked back to his instrument. Experimentally he dragged the bow across the strings, and was pleased to find the sound soothed him rather than aggravated his head. Pulling on his dressing gown, he stood and placed himself by the window so that he was bathed in moonlight. Then he played, closing his eyes.
After a week or so he was able to put the incident with the faerie out of his mind and continue on as normal, but he soon found that the drug wasn't affecting him like it normally did. He needed more and more of it at a much faster rate, and every night he went to bed sick with trepidation, plagued with a fear that he would not see the light of day.
One night, after weeks of this, he woke up again, as he always did, and lay there staring at the ceiling.
That's when the pain started. He gasped and stifled the scream that was trying to tear its way out of his throat, curling up on his side and shuddering. The agony was centred on his shoulder blades, as if someone were slicing at them with knives. Tentatively, he reached around with his arm and gently felt at one of them with his hand. Underneath the skin, something shifted.
Overcome with shock, he rolled over and fell off the bed. The movement made him feel sick to his stomach and he retched, barely avoiding emptying his dinner onto the wooden floorboards.
He stood, shaky, dizzy, nauseated, his entire back now awash with a pain that made him want to take every granule of the demon drug lying in the box on the table. He reached for it, but– no. He knew that it wouldn't help.
He knew that this was probably the end. He never thought that he would go like this, was always under the impression that he would get weaker and weaker and then slip away. But what else could this be but Satan dragging him by his shoulders down to hell?
I don't want to die, he thought hysterically. I'm supposed to have longer. I'm supposed to–
He didn't want them to find see like this. He didn't want them to find his corpse on the bed in the morning.
His breath came in ragged gasps. He tried to concentrate on the sound of the blood roaring in his ears and not on the feeling of a thousand hot pokers being stabbed into his spine. Mechanically, he began to dress.
Trousers.
Shirt.
Socks.
Shoes.
Oh God.
He stumbled out of the room and down the stairs, the world blurry and laughing at him.
Front door. Front steps. The cool night air wrapped around him like a shawl, and for a second some sweet relief was brought to him. But then the fire licking across his upper back burnt away the wind and black spots dotted his vision. With one last push he shoved himself out onto the street and fell to his knees.
He closed his eyes and waited for the end.
Goodbye.
Despite the pain, it was one of the calmest moments of his life.
"Fool," hissed a voice into his ear. He opened his eyes to see a small hand wrap around his wrist and lift him to his feet with surprising strength. He swayed and nearly fell. Isolane brought herself in front of him and clicked her tongue critically. "I told you to see the warlock."
"I…" he rasped, "I… my back…"
She shook her head. "Follow me. Try to stay conscious."
She dragged him by his sleeve and dazedly he followed her. The London buildings muddied and shivered, as if they were being reflected in a dirty puddle. Each step brought new pain but they didn't stop moving, even when his fingers started to burn too.
And, for some reason, Isolane was talking.
"… be displeased…" he heard, over the pounding of his heart. "… warlock girl. No good. Bane should…"
"I can't," he moaned, almost incoherent, as they turned a corner.
She snapped her head round to look at him and narrowed her eyes. "Almost there. Hold on."
The sentence was so human that he choked out a laugh. "Hold on…" he murmured.
Another street and another row of houses. He hadn't even noticed until then that they were in a residential area. She was picking up the pace now, throwing glances towards him, her blank eyes somehow still expressing worriment.
They stumbled to a halt, and he didn't know whether it was of his volition or hers. But then he felt them turning, his vision too blurry to make out anything concrete about his surroundings, and he was being led up a pair of steps.
She let go of his sleeve. He crumpled to the ground, like a marionette with cut strings.
The sound of knocking, and then a thin shaft of light cast itself over his face as a door opened. Something was standing over him, something with a pair of familiar cat eyes that glinted strangely and a smile nearly as ominous as Isolane's shark-toothed grin.
"… that boy, how unexpected… thought… sooner…" it said, its voice sounding fractured, as if they were underwater.
"… apologies," the faerie beside him replied. "… in?"
Jem felt himself being dragged into a house. He wondered if he might protest this, but when he opened his mouth all that came out was a cry of pain as his shoulder joints creaked and moved.
"… wake up the neighbours," said the cat-eyed creature, and suddenly he couldn't scream any more, his vocal cords frozen.
The wooden floor underneath him changed to a plush carpet and then sofa cushions. He was dropped unceremoniously from the hands of whoever was dragging him.
"Well, settle yourself in," he heard. "It's going to be a long night."
He felt consciousness leaving him, and welcomed oblivion with open arms.
Oblivion didn't last for long for Jem.
He drifted in and out of sleep, if you could call it sleep; he woke up regularly, trembling and sweating and crying with the pain. Each time Magnus would stand over him and press a hand to his back, chanting in a demon tongue, trying to numb him to it, but it seemed to do little.
"We just have to wait for the yin fen to leave his system, and it will get a little easier," he told Isolane, who had been watching the whole thing with cool detachment.
She looked toward the window, and then stood up from her previous position on the chaise longue. "He will survive?"
"I should think so."
"I leave you, then," so speaking she moved toward the door, stopping in the hallway. After a moment's hesitation she bowed her head respectfully. "You may consider your debt to the Seelie repaid."
She left.
He went back and sat in his favourite armchair, a fabulous pink velvet number that had served him well through near every test imaginable. He eyed Jem critically.
"Think of it this way," he said to him. "At least you'll be attractive. Well, more attractive than you were before. Not that you weren't attractive already, mind you."
The boy groaned and shifted.
"Good thing I put that silencing spell on you. You'd be shouting up a storm without it, I'm sure."
To his surprise, Jem's eyes slowly lifted open. "Take it off," he gurgled, so quiet it was barely audible. Magnus couldn't imagine the energy it must have taken for him to force his enchanted vocal cords to move. "The spell. I won't scream, I promise."
"Trust me. You'll scream."
He hissed in disappointment and buried his head in one of the cushions. For a moment, the warlock thought that he had fallen asleep again, but then Jem gasped and arched his back, letting out a smothered cry of pain that was clearly stifled by the spell before collapsing back down.
There was a moment of stillness as Magnus considered whether he should try a painkilling spell again.
But then Jem whispered, "I'm dying."
"No, you're not."
"I want to. I want to die."
"Oh, you're only saying that because you're in horrific, mind-numbing pain."
"What's happening to me?"
He shrugged. "Mixture of a lifelong enchantment wearing off and withdrawal symptoms."
He turned his head to look at the warlock and fixed him with a horrified look. "Withdrawal–"
"Faeries aren't affected by demon blood drugs. At least, they aren't addictive."
"I'm not a…" the effort of talking became too much for Jem, and, exhausted, he closed his eyes. "Not a faerie…"
Magnus couldn't help but feel a little pity for him. "Not dying," he reiterated. "Congratulations."
The den was dark and cloudy and comfortingly silent. Everywhere he looked there were eyes– glassy eyes, dead eyes– staring at the ceiling and–
Oh, what a beautiful night. What a beautiful night to puff the day away.
He wasn't sure what they were smoking. It smelt sickly sweet and floral; could have been opium, could have been yin fen. And those people around him, hidden in the shadows. For all he saw of them, they could have been faeries or humans or demons or angels.
He took a pipe in shaky hands and inhaled and inhaled till he felt he could float away into the ceiling. He lay on a pile of silk pillows and laughed, his laughter taking form and settling itself around him.
Numb. He was numb, and there was a conscious absence of something. Something missing.
Something.
Something.
and now his thoughts were dripping down the back of his mind
and there was something…
it was the pain, that was it, there was no pain anymore
hah
He laughed again, and his laughter numbed him again.
hah
hah
no pain, imagine that
hah
It took a moment for Jem to register the faint warmth on his face as sunlight.
He was groggy and hungry, and he spent several minutes, eyes still closed, debating whether or not to get up. But then the smell of tea filled his nostrils – odd, considering that the smell of tea was usually not strong enough for him to notice it rooms away– and with a groan he stretched out.
He winced. He was sore. Had he been fighting demons the night before? Why–
His memory suddenly returned to him and his eyes flew open. He was in a parlour of some sort, laid out on a sofa and covered in a cream-coloured silk blanket that was nothing like anything in the institute. Incense lingered in the air; old incense, probably from days ago, but strong enough to slow his thoughts to a confused trickle.
There were so many smells, in fact. The smell of tea and incense, yes, but also the smell of silk and velvet, the smell of the rich blue dyes that had been used on the wallpaper. It was disorienting.
He pushed himself oh-so-gently to a sitting position and found himself less dizzy than expected. All but the strongest of the smells were fading to the back of his mind, too, and with his head cleared suitably he stood.
An ornate clock on the mantelpiece signalled to him that it was ten in the morning.
They'll be worried, he mused, less bothered about this fact than expected. He'd return eventually, he supposed.
He walked closer to the fireplace to inspect the clock. It was made of ivory and had details painted in gold leaf. It wasn't at all to his taste, but looked expensive all the same. Curiously he reached out to trace one of the carved cherubim that surrounded the twelve.
He promptly forgot about the cherubim and gawped at his hand instead. His fingers had an extra joint. His fingers had an extra joint. His skin seemed paler too, almost silvery, but that could have just been sickness induced pallor or a trick of the light. His fingers having another knuckle, however…
He stumbled back and tried to control his breathing. His stomach growled.
Food, he thought, attempting to focus on one thing. Find food.
He wandered out into the corridor, trying to ignore the alien hands by his side, the multitude of scents, and a strange heaviness on his back.
At the end of the hallway was a door slightly ajar. Jem hovered outside, unsure whether or not to enter.
"You can come in, you know," came a voice.
He took a hesitant step into the room. The space was dominated by a large, hardwood dining table, upon which sat a blue porcelain tea set. On one of the two chairs set at opposite ends of the table sat his host.
Magnus Bane eyed him critically. "You're a mess," he proclaimed. "Sit."
Jem sat. Expertly the warlock laid out a cup and saucer for him, pouring out the steaming liquid from the teapot before dropping in several sugar cubes.
"I don't take that much sugar,"
"You do now," satisfied with Jem's, he started on his own tea. "You'll find your tastes have changed somewhat. Go ahead, try it. It's imported from China. Should remind you of your homeland, no?"
He took a cautious sip. The tea was strong, incredibly so, and still somehow bitter enough to be near unpalatable despite the sweetening. He choked.
Magnus lifted up the silver tongs. "More sugar?"
"I– Yes. Yes please."
Three more cubes were dropped into the steaming liquid. "Faeries," sighed the warlock. "They have such delicate constitutions when it comes to these things."
Faeries. Jem looked down to his hand again and widened his eyes at the silver-tinged skin. His fingers unfurled reflexively and his cup clattered onto the saucer, slopping hot tea over the table and his bare stomach. He hissed in pain.
His host winced. "Careful with the china. It was a personal gift from Frantz Heinrich Müller," at Jem's confused expression, he flippantly tossed a hand aside, waving away the boy's ignorance in the same way one would refuse a dish at a dinner party. "18th century Copenhagen porcelain. You understand."
He didn't understand, but thought better of asking for more explanation. Instead he steeled himself and gave Magnus the most direct gaze he could. "What is happening to me?"
There was a moment of silence as he considered the question.
"Nephilim, of course, are the offspring of mortals and angels," he said, finally. "Those like me are born of demons and humans. Werewolves, vampires, they are simply diseased mundanes. But faeries… Faeries are of pure immortal stock. They have the blood of hell and heaven through their veins. They are unique. They are masters of illusion. None are so beautiful as the fay, and none so cruel. I would rather be on the bad side of one of your Shax demons or your underworld-summoned phantasms than a Seelie courtier, any day," he gave a short laugh. "And that is the problem with Shadowhunters. They fear the ugly things, when it is beauty that is dangerous. An ugly thing can kill you. But a beautiful thing can make you want to kill yourself."
Suddenly, he rose, and gestured for Jem to do the same. "Through there," he said, pointing to another exit at the other end of the room. "A mirror."
Jem pulled back his chair and moved across the wooden floorboards, his hand shaking as it grasped the knob and turned, pushing open the door. It lead him into a small corridor. At the end of it stood an ornate looking glass. He halted, only vaguely aware of someone moving to stand behind him.
"What do you see?" asked Magnus Bane.
"A beautiful thing," Jem replied hoarsely.
"A beautiful thing," he agreed. "A dangerous thing. You are one of the fay, James Carstairs. A changeling of the Seelie court."
"But I am nephilim. I use blessed weapons. I was marked. How–"
Magnus shook his head and interrupted him. "Come, it is nearly eleven. I need to pick up some things in the downworlder district," the Warlock ran his hands through his hair and groaned. "I suppose I'll have to explain on the way. What an inconvenience."