Will was utterly frozen, as if chiseled from ice, yet incapable of being shattered. It felt as if his heart were swelling, nearly breaking him, turning his body limp until he hit the ground in a pile of arms and legs and nothing. His mind was no longer with him, nor was anything else for that matter. He felt completely detached from his body, like one of those ridiculous stringed puppets that Will had always found disturbing.
I love you, Will and I am so sorry.

Those last words swam through his head, attempting to dissuade him that they were real, that Tessa had truly been here, telling him all those things.

I could never love you anymore then I already do.

She hadn't said that? Had she? Did she mean them? She couldn't have. Why, oh why had she chosen this time to tell him? Will was just beginning to accept it! Tessa could never love him. He'd trained his mind, focused his every thought around that fact which had stuck with him every minute of every day for weeks trying to believe it. He had believed it, too! Up until this moment, that was.

Everything slipped away as he argued with himself, never moving an inch. He stood there, alone with his thoughts, his insides at war with each other. Finally, when he could think coherently, a new uproar began.

She loves you. A small voice crackled at the edge of his mind. Will shook his head.

It doesn't matter. He fought back, refusing to allow that voice to influence him in any way. She is not mine.

But she admitted it!

As I admitted it to her, you infernal concience! he mentally screamed, his index finger and thumb grabbing at the bridge of his nose.

But the voice would not return to the silent place it had materialized from. You could at least talk to him.

Will had had enough with this. He'd rivaled against himself for days and it was beginning to get tiresome. I would never do that to Jem! He is happy and I will not be the one to strip him of that! I will die before I deprive him of his last breathing wish!

And at that, the voice deminished, like an only torched flame in the seeping blackness.

He sighed in relief. The voice was gone but his pain was still there, accompanied only by misery and confusion.

"Will!" Someone called, grasping his shoulder.

Henry.

"It's time."

Will could not acknowlege his words, could only pull his lips up into a false smile, one of which he could not feel, before numbly walking alongside Henry, towards the isle that every guest was sitting apposed to.

Henry stationed him in a front row seat, everything visible from this point. Time seemed to move by at a very snail-like pace. He could see the small podium placed at the end of the white silk where the conductor would handle the ceremony. He could see the vases of yellow flowers hazardously placed on small tables on either side of the podium; could see a small sea of heads turning...turning...

Watching as Tessa began her decent down the isle.
There was no music, just a silence that weighed down Will's heart as his eyes, unable to look away, followed her past the curious lookers, beyond the flowers, drawing farther towards Jem, each step cutting into Will like the tip of a blade.
She was smiling, a delicate smile that looked far too fragile on her strong face, and just for a second, Will's belief in her words she'd said dissappeared from possibility and out of existence.

This was a mostly Mundane ceremony. More of it then of Shadowhunter without exchanging runes to Tessa, just words.

They joined hands once she'd reached the end, facing the man behind the podium. He was a tall man, greying hair with a receding hairline, cacoooned in a great black robe with golden taffles at the end of each sleeve.
"I stand before you today," he said in a loud, deltoed voice, "to bind these two people in matromony; to gift these young people with a life that they may share until death do they part."

Until death do they part. Will had always despised that line, the way it was spoken with such determination and sincerity. Surely the loved rejoined after death? For what was the point of life if there was nothing after?

"If anyone here thinks otherwise about this particular binding, please speak now or forever hold your peace."

Will remained silent.

"I shall now present the ring," the conductor announced, turning to retrieve a single golden band. Will did not have to look to know that it bore on it the Carstair's family Mark.

The pain that seared Will's heart only continued to increase as every moment skidded by.

The man handed Jem the ring and he turned to Tessa, radiating such joy that he almost glowed. "Tessa," he spoke, voice strong, confident. "Ever since I had lost my family I've felt an imbalance in my life, dangling below its short duration." Will caught sight of Tessa's clenching hands. "Since then, I have gained a new family, one to which I am bound so strongly to that I care for more then I ever had before."

She bit her lip. Will recognized that method she used to keep from crying.

"But that imbalance was still there, my feet never quite planted firmly on the ground." Jem swallowed visibly. "But since you entered my life, I have begun to stablize. My legs no longer trip but are sure-footed because of you. I have gone without that for a very long time, Tessa, stripped of possibility only increasing my longing for something I had no idea I ached for."

Will glanced away, inhaling stiffly.

"My heart must have sought you out before my mind, Tessa. You are my home now, a home in which I cannot bear to be without."

Nor I, Will thought.

Tessa swiped at her eyes, filled with joyful tears as Jem slipped on the ring as gently as a rustled feather.

Yes, his mind must have snapped so that he had conjured Tessa saying those things to him. For those words could never belong to the girl who stood in front of him now.

"Jem," Tessa began, clearing her throat before speaking, "I could never imagine being so loved by anyone so devotedly in my entire life. I had thought to believe that they existed only in fairy tales." Will looked up, needing to see her face as she said these things to someone else and not to him.

"I now know that it was not a fairy tale I had been chasing, but the chance at love itself. To be able to give it and receive it with such strength and loyalty." She was crying now, Will noticed, wanting nothing more then to wipe them away with his lips. He pushed the thought out of his mind.

"You are the kindest man I have ever known and I cannot begin to explain my amazement that I get to be yours."

I love you, Tessa Grey.

She smiled. "I love you, Jem Carstairs."

Tessa did not slip a ring onto Jem's finger. Instead, the conductor retrieved a stele from the depths of his robe, placing it over the skin of Jem's left hand.

"Do you, Tessa Grey," he began to recite as the stele's marking began to imbed itself into James's skin. "Take this man as your lawfully wedded husband, to love and to cherish in sickness and in health for as long as you be bound by this earth?"

Tessa nodded as the finishing touches were added to the rune. "I do."

A cup filled with wine as bright as blood was handed to Jem in a golden goblet, Tessa twining her right arm- the one with the ring- and Jem's left around its base, sharing a sip to seal the bound.

As soon as their lips touched, however, Tessa's eyes flickered to the side before her head snapped up and she jerked back, her eyes widening in disbelief and terror.

Will stood abruptly after catching the look in her eyes and turned in the direction Tessa stared at, his blood turning cold as he found them.

Hidden behind a flimsy haze of white fog and thick interlocking branches of forest, was a group of people. But Will knew that they were nothing like people, anything but human.

Instinctually, he went for his belt, but there was no blade. He was unarmed and unprepared. It had given Mortmain the perfect opportunity.

A perfect opportunity to introduce them to part of his army.