Tessa was furious by the time she made it back to the hotel. She pushed her way into the room by way of a muttered spell after the key card failed twice. She slammed the offending bit of plastic down on the little table by the door and kicked off her shoes. She had every intention of launching into a explanation of why everyone in that church was an idiot and exactly what they had done to earn that label.

But then she saw Jem.

He looked up at her with a mild and curious expression. His eyebrows just slightly raised and a tiny smile lifting one corner of his lips. That wasn't the problem. The thing that made her stop before she'd said a single word was that he was sitting in the same place he'd been when she'd left him hours before. His shoes were still on.

"James?" she said. Everything else had disappeared.

"It didn't go well?" his voice was so normal it almost convinced her not to worry but he didn't move. He still sat in that same position as though he'd been turned to stone.

"They're idiots," she said because she thought maybe playing along with his little charade of normalcy might help he come back to it. All her rage was gone. She let any last pieces of it go as she was crossing the room to him.

She touched his hair first brushing it away from his forehead with just her finger tips because touching him more than that felt like an invasion when he was this quiet. It was soft as down in her fingers. The familiarity of it made her bolder. He watched her as she ran her knuckles down from his temples to his jaw. He'd lost any of that child's softness that had still lingered when she'd known him during their adolescence. He'd never stopped being the kind of beautiful that was delicate and gentle but there was nothing feminine in the lines of his face.

"Something is wrong," she said once she'd caught his face between her hands and tilted it up so she could see his eyes.

"It's nothing. It's only that the past is strong here," he said. Everything Natasha had said to her that evening came back to her. He was more right than he knew but she wasn't going to bring up something like that until she understood why he was so unhappy. Then again, she already knew.

"This is about Will," she said.

He was silent for a very long time and she waited. His hands came up and he held her wrists where her hands were still cupped around his cheeks. His eyes had fallen shut and his breathing slowed. She waited for the thoughts to work their way through his mind. He was razer sharp. Quick thinking and more intelligent that just about anyone else she knew but when the past got in the way like this he needed time.

The Silent Brothers saw the lines of the world laid out before them. Jem claimed it was often through a fog but they could still make out the shapes. From the deaths and births to the rises and falls of empires, they saw it all. They saw it change and shift. He had always been weaker than some of them but Jem had been a part of that. He could no longer see any of it but the memory of that knowledge still filled his mind sometimes. She had learned to give him the space he needed to think it through.

"It hasn't gone," he said his eyes still shut and his hands still holding hers in place.

She stepped in closer as he went quiet again. A little twitch of a smile escaped the mask when she nudged his knee and he moved it so she could stand between his legs. He didn't open his eyes but his hands released her wrists and looped around her waist instead. The smile was small and faraway but it stayed in place.

"I can feel him. Properly. I can feel him the way I used to. I'd thought I remembered what the parabatai bond felt like but I was wrong. I'd forgotten what it really meant. It feels different than I imagined and exactly like I'd forgotten. But that doesn't make sense does it?" he said.

"I know what you mean. I'm almost as old as you are," she smiled at that, as though the few months he was older than her mattered when your lives spanned more than a century. "I know what it's like to forget that you've ever known things, to lose entire pieces of who you used to be to time, to lose details that don't matter like Sophie's last name and details that do like the way her voice sounded when she was telling me off. I had forgotten once what it meant to love someone with every part of myself. I thought I knew what that meant but I didn't really remember it until you came home to me. I understand Jem, I do."

"I'm sure if I close my eyes and turn around he'll be there. It is utter madness," Jem's voice was almost a whisper and he muffled it further by pulling her in and pressing his face into her stomach. It was a childlike gesture and she smoothed his hair and rubbed his back as though he were that long lost little boy who'd had his childhood ripped out from under him at eleven years old.

"I've been afraid, and this is madness as well, I know that it is. I've been afraid that if I move or talk or jostle the memory at all, I'll lose it again," Jem spoke into her blouse and he dropped his voice another level. She doubted that she had actually heard it when he said, "Bloody hell but I miss him."

"You can't spend your life sitting still," she told him, "Trust me on that one."

"You were angry, why?" he said still speaking to a spot just below her ribs as she played with his hair. She found that silver streak that reminded her of the boy he had been so very long ago and ran it through her fingers. Jem had learned to live without his other piece but it wasn't easy.

"Natasha has idiot friends, utter morons," she said. "I don't want to talk about them right now."

"I'd like to know what's going on," Jem said in that mild inarguable voice he had. Gentle and kind and impossible to ignore but then that was how she always thought of Jem.

She put her hand on his shoulder where the parabatai rune lay hidden by his shirt and let herself think the thought she had been pretending did not exist. She dropped down beside him on the edge of the bed and he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She could see the appeal of sitting here and holding onto the maybe.

"There's a portal," she said, "It is dropping people here in the city and they can't figure out who is casting it or why. They sent a pair of hellhounds after a person who fell through this afternoon. It came waltzing back into their headquarters like calling up animalistic demons was just something people did on Tuesday afternoons. It's not just that it's against the Law. It's just plain stupid. This is how people get killed. They wouldn't let me see any of the arrivals. They kicked me out when I had the audacity to get angry that they were releasing demons into the streets of a mundane city."

"And the part you're leaving out?" he asked and she smiled because of course he would be able to tell.

She looked at him and his eerie stillness. It was his Silent Brother stillness that so deeply unnerved her because it left her feeling like she was losing him again. She considered lying because it wasn't a thought he should be dwelling on when he was like this. They had spent so much time lying to protect one another when they were young and she didn't want to go back to that.

"It's time travel portal," she said.

He smiled like she'd told a bad joke, "Time travel is impossible. I was a Silent Brother for more than a century. We tracked time. Time is a wheel but it can never return to where it has been."

"They're pretty sure," she said as she explained the rest of what she knew. She used the word 'prisoner' where Natasha had used 'arrival'.

"It could be an elaborate hoax," he said.

Tessa was surprised at herself for not having thought of that herself. She was usually cynical enough to expect the worst but she had taken Natasha's assertion that it was a time travel portal at face value. It went deeper than Natasha's conviction. It had everything to do with that thought she kept pretending she wasn't thinking. She wanted it to be true.

"Then why are they keeping it such a secret? Why risk raising demons and using magic like this so close to Idris if it wasn't for a good reason?" she asked.

Jem raised his eyebrows in a question. There must have been something in her voice, some expression that had betrayed that buried thought. She shook her head, "I can't even think it. I can't."

"Ok," he said. Like the blue sneakers the little modern phrase seemed out of step with who she thought he was and yet it fit.

"We're going to have to do something," she said with her eyes shut as she leaned against him.

"Call the Clave?" he asked.

"I'd rather not," she said. Jem trusted the Clave in a way that she couldn't. His faith in the organization wasn't blind or unshakable but it was still stronger than hers which was nonexistent. "These people are my friends and they're so young. I don't think they have any idea what they're involved with. I won't throw Frankie and Nat to the council. Nat's past couldn't stand up to that kind of scrutiny and Frankie couldn't handle it at all. They'd end up arrested and at the very least locked up somewhere."

"We can't walk away," he said.

"I know that," she said. "We need to get those people out of there if nothing else."

Jem looked at her and the thing they weren't saying passed between them again but it stayed silent.

He finally moved to sit up against the headboard so she could snuggle into him a little closer as they talked. They planned. She talked through what she had seen of the church and Jem asked the questions that proved he was better at tactical thinking than she was. They were still wrapped up in each other as they made the phone calls that would get them enough support to do what they need to do.

"Magnus claims that Dmitri might be a Zakarov," Tessa said when she hung up the phone. "Apparently he has been sniffing around every rumour of time travel magic in the last half a century. Something happened in Melbourne but Magnus doesn't know what only that a Zakarov was involved and people died."

"You say Zakarov like that should mean something," Jem said.

"The Zakarov siblings, there's a boy and a girl, are better than a thousand years old. They're warlock legends. I would have said they were myth but Magnus said he met the sister once. They were supposed to be there at the fall of Constantinople and or maybe they caused the fall of Rome itself, depends on the story," Tessa said waving her hands.

"Oh and they worked with the magic divisions of the Nazi party and they're behind the Faerie Wars of the 1200s. They're like bogeymen for warlock fairy tales. We tell the young ones that the Zakarovs will come and get them if they use dark magics. It's all bollocks and hearsay," Tessa explained.

"Or perhaps all the stories are true," Jem said.

"Perhaps we should sleep," Tessa said. "I don't want to infiltrate the headquarters of a psychopathic ancient warlock without being rested."

It was early morning, sometime before dawn but only just. The planning had taken most of night. Tessa was as comfortable as she could be with a plan that included so many uncontrollable details, like Natasha, and had been drafted via long distance phone calls and guesswork.

"I don't know that I could sleep," Jem said.

"Come to bed with me anyways. Take off your shoes, have a cup of tea, tell me again that this is going to work," she said.

Tessa used a spell to make the tea appear so they wouldn't have to call room service or leave to get it. She didn't bother with pajamas and just kicked off clothing until she sat in the middle of the bed wearing a tank top and a pair of underwear with the cup of tea wrapped in her hands. She hadn't intended more than getting comfortable in the most efficient manner possible but Jem gave her a smile that said he took it as more than that.

The smile didn't fall away as he kicked off his shoes and almost as much clothing as she had left on the floor. He sat behind her and pulled her in close so they were skin to skin.

They were silent as she drank her tea and he ran his fingers up and down her arms. She was half asleep when he finally took the cup away from her and put it beside the one he hadn't touched on the little side table. She couldn't see him where he sat behind her but she was surrounded by the warmth of him. He buried his face in the crook of her neck for a moment.

"Can I say it aloud?" he asked.

"Are you sure you want to?" she asked.

"Are you afraid that it's true or that it's not?" he said.

"Yes, I'm afraid of both of those things," she said cuddling back into his chest a little more. He held her tighter.

She slowed her breathing to match his and tried to find some artificial version of his unshakable calm. Once she was paying attention, she could feel the anxiety running through him. It just ran quieter in him than it did for her. It was there in the tension in his chest, the way his fingers trembled just a fraction, even his heart beating too fast for how still he was.

"Tell me," she said with her eyes shut and her heart in her throat.

"Will is here somewhere," he said and a flash of blood smeared hallway filled her vision and turned her stomach harder in recollection than it had at the moment.

"Tess," Jem said uncurling her fingers and turning her to look at him. His fingers were on her face and she opened her eyes to find his only inches away. Dark brown, warm as a summer afternoon and sprinkled with both silver and gold if she took the time to look. She took the time until she could think straight again.

Speaking the thought aloud required closing her eyes and clearing her thoughts but she finally whispered, "He'll be ok. If," the words died and she had to fight to pull them back together again but she still couldn't force her mouth to form the shape of his name. Her voice was small when she continued, "If he is here, we'll find him."

For a long time, Jem was right and though they turned out the lights and wrapped themselves in blankets and each other, they didn't sleep. In the morning, Tessa would still be able to hear the melody Jem was humming to himself when she fell asleep. It was a song of training rooms and circles of fire, of battles and love and little boys tying their lives together. The last time she'd heard it had been one of the hardest days of her life.

She finally let his name out as she fell asleep, "Will."

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AN: thank you to everyone who has read and extra special thanks to those that have left feedback! I love writing this and am glad other people seem to be enjoying it as well.