AN: If my story notes haven't been clear so far, I ship everyone with everyone and this chapter is very much in that vein. This is pretty much just a happy fluffy chapter because happy fluffy chapters make me happy.

The questions were endless. Jem sat at one of the long tables in the Institute's library where a particular bored school boy had carved JW into the wood at some point in his childhood. He considered doing the same. Adding a JC just to see how Ethan Lancaster would react was a childish response. Then again, it was close to noon and thanks to the time change, Jem hadn't slept in nearly 36 hours. He felt childish. He just wanted to go home. No one he wanted to talk to was in the room.

Most of the questions had been about verifying that the portal did what they said it did. Most of the warlocks had run for it during the battle but a few had stuck close in the hopes that it would keep them safe. They explained what they knew and Jem had a new appreciation for Tessa's assertion that they were idiots.

It was like listening to children tell you about how to play with fire because it wasn't really that hot.

The most frustrating part of the hours of questions hadn't been the warlocks but the way little band of time travelers was treated. All the doubt fell on them and the questions kept circling around whether or not they were lying. Alison in particular had gotten more and more snappish as the process had dragged on.

Will had erased all doubts he might have had. Jem believed them and had started out gently defensive when the questions started getting invasive or pushy but had become less gentle about it with each repetition. They were tired and hurt and deserved better. They'd been treated as prisoners and Jem had sincerely hoped that the Clave would treat them better than this.

Finally it was simply enough.

"It's time to go to sleep," Jem said interrupting someone in mid-sentence. He didn't even know who it was anymore. "If there aren't enough rooms here, I will pay for hotel rooms myself but it is time to sleep."

"There are rooms here, it is best if everyone stays here," Maryse said giving Jem a look that had everything to do with the fact that Will wasn't there. He didn't flinch. He smiled, small but pleasant, and didn't say anything.

He understood why she considered taking Will out of the group to be a reckless move but he did not agree, nor did he really care what opinions she might hold on the matter.

"Because you won't let us leave?" Trevor asked. The batwinged warlock who had raised the hellhounds was one of Jem's least favourite people at that moment. That he'd stayed during the fight seemed less an act of honesty or trying to do the right thing and more like cowardice. He was more afraid of the shadowy Dmitri than he was of the Clave. That was unsettling given how most warlocks who had lived through the days of Circle considered the Clave but it wasn't why he bothered Jem so much. He'd threatened Tessa and nearly gotten Will killed. That he'd done it out of ignorance and cowardice made it worse than an act of evil.

"Yes," Maryse said. "You will be staying here until other arrangements can be made."

It took more time after that to get everyone organized and settled. Jem found a spot near the library door and waited. He let his body fall back into old patterns. Still and expressionless not out of necessity but habit.

"He's your parabatai? The guy at the fight with the dark hair?" Jace had appeared at his shoulder and Jem turned and looked at him without changing his expression. He was too tired for expressions.

"Yes," Jem said. It had come up during the rounds of interrogation. Jem had simply told the truth and let the reactions go.

"You're sure though, that it's him. That's why you keep siding with the arrivals," Jace said, the little name had stuck thus far. "Could you feel it?"

"Yes, it came back," Jem said putting his hand to the rune without meaning too. Neither of them needed it explained.

"That'd be strange," Jace said.

Jem gave a little shrug. It was strange but it was also an impossible gift. It was a thing he'd wanted too much to even ask for in his own mind.

If he'd had been given a wish it would be to ask for one more conversation when they were both human. He wanted to sit with Will and be entirely himself. They had had only five years and Jem had never truly gotten to know Will as he was once the curse was gone. They'd been friends as best they could be but the Brotherhood had been a wall.

Looking back on it, there were not any other choices but Will had seen it as a type of abandonment. Jem had always known how much he would lose when he took that chance but he'd been able to see them grow and change, he'd been able to keep them safe if only from a distance. It was the right choice, the best one he could have made.

"He's related to me?" Jace made it a question.

"Distantly," Jem said and he knew it was a cagey response but Tessa had always been uncomfortable with starting that conversation with Jace and he didn't want to say the wrong thing. It wasn't untrue but it didn't feel like the right answer either.

Jem looked at Jace then. He didn't look like Will unless you were looking at the details. Jem had picked them out, the little bits of genetic flotsam that had made it down through the generations. Tessa told him he was a little odd for noticing that they had the same hands or that Jace rolled his eyes the same way that she did when he was annoyed. There was some resemblance in the smile too.

"I've never met another Herondale. Well, except for Imogen and she was… well, Imogen," Jace trailed off. Jem didn't suppress the smirk because she had certainly been a very particular sort of person.

"Will's one of the best," Jem said. "There are many reasons to be proud of that name up and down your family tree and Will is one of them. So was Imogen in a lot of ways. But Will was, is, always will be, my best friend. He's one of the best people you will every meet."

"Maryse wants you to bring him in," Jace said.

"I know," Jem said. "We will but I'm going to go sleep for a week before I do anything else. Maryse said she wanted to talk to me before I left."

"Just leave," Jace said. "They're talking about portals again in there. Just leave. If it had been a century since I'd seen Alec," he shrugged, "I'd just leave."

Jem smiled at him and then he turned and just left.

Bright afternoon sunlight slanted through a gap in the curtains by the time Jem made it home. The apartment was warm because sunlight always heated it up and the scent of smoke was in the air. It clung to his clothes and it must be clinging to everyone who had been there. The apartment was quiet. The sounds of the street below and even of the neighbours were muffled not just by thick glass and brick walls but also by magic.

They'd had an apartment in Macau for a little while with thin walls that had let the sound of their fighting neighbours in. Tessa had perfected sound wardings while they were living there. They had no idea if the neighbours here had happy marriages and they were perfectly happy without that knowledge.

Jem found Will and Tessa leaned together on the sofa in the living room. She had twisted towards him so she could tuck her head in against his chest. His fingers were still tangled in her hair. Jem paused on the stairs and looked at them.

They had been his touchstone for sixty years. Not only each of them but both of them. The yearly meetings with Tessa and the silent, stolen conversations with Will had been important, essential to hold onto his humanity. The two of them together though had meant something different. How much they had loved each other had been its own foundation for him. A way of proving that there was good in the world.

He had seen them together but he'd never gotten to see the moments like this. A part of him whispered that he should turn and leave them alone but a louder part needed to be sure that Will was truly there. Jem crossed the room quietly and touched his shoulder. Will scrunched up his face and grimaced.

"M'sleeping, go away, Carstairs," he said his voice was indistinct. Jem had forgotten these conversations. They'd been a regular occurrence once. Will would simply neglect to sleep and Jem would be left with the task of attempting to wake him the next day. Anyone else would suffer verbal abuse if they tried.

This time, Will didn't wake enough to realize he had someone sleeping on his chest but he still knew that it was Jem talking to him.

"We do have beds in this century," Jem said sitting down beside him.

"Don't care," Will said and when he shifted, probably intending to shove Jem away, he became aware of Tessa and his eyes flew open and he was suddenly completely awake. He looked down at the top of her head for a very long time before turning his attention and his dawning realization to Jem. It took him a long moment to remember where he was.

"You're fine, stay there," Jem said. Will had gone from relaxed to tense in an instant and he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands. Jem was too tired to know what needed saying to ease Will's anxiety that he'd done something wrong. He didn't know how to explain it without explaining entire lifetimes and he was too tired for that too.

He settled back on the sofa in so his shoulder was against Will's and reached across to where Tessa's head lay against the other one. He pushed her hair back from her face. She didn't stir but he hadn't expected her too. She would likely be asleep for another twelve hours yet.

Will schooled his expression and stayed in place. It was feigned relaxation but it was done quite well. His hair was a tangled mess of black curls, longer and wilder than it would be at any other point in his life. Jem touched a piece that stuck out at a funny angle from his forehead.

"You look ridiculous," Jem said dropping his hand back to his lap. He was being weird. He was often weird but he usually had social rules to fall back on when he forgot how people behaved normally. Mostly people didn't have to think about whether it was appropriate to shake hands or hug or tell funny stories. Jem had worked out through observation and faux pas when and with who it was ok to do most things.

Will didn't fit into any of the categories that Jem had taught himself to react to. Touching his hair didn't seem weird until after he'd done it.

"I style my hair with live ferrets. You encase your head in a glass bauble and then release the ferrets inside. It's the only way to get it to stand up like this," Will said with a perfectly straight face.

Jem looked at him, thinking hard because he was still trying to decide if he had crossed some social line. What Will had said hadn't made sense. The moment stretched before Jem started to laugh. He was tired and stressed and once he started laughing it was almost impossible to stop.

"Yours is the right colour now, if we got you some ferrets we could make you look almost as stylish as I do," Will said reaching over to ruffle Jem's hair into a mess. It made him laugh harder as he tried to pull away. Will got a fistful of shirt and dragged him back. Neither of them were fighting hard because they were trying not to wake Tessa. Jem stopped struggling and let Will push his hair up so it stuck up as well. That it stayed made him aware of how much he needed to wash the remains of the battle out of it.

He was still laughing when he sat back against the sofa. Will was smirking at him now and looked just like he did when Jem called up memories of him. His memories from before the Brotherhood were stretched thin but still more vibrant than the ones he had made during that time. Impressions, images, sounds, even smell didn't hold the way it did in his human memories. He could remember the facts but nothing that felt real the way his memories from before and after felt real. It was like 130 years of dreaming between the beginning of his life and the resumption of it.

This was Will as Jem could truly remember him. They had weeks left together at the point in history that Will had come from. That thought knocked out the last of the giggles that were plaguing him.

"Is this a madhouse?" Tessa asked blinking awake and pushing herself up enough to see him. Jem almost started laughing again just because he was relieved that she was well enough to talk or maybe just because he had both of them in the same place.

"This has always been a madhouse," Jem told her and then he kissed her. She was only half awake and she tasted of smoke but she was well and she was there. He pulled back sooner than he wanted to and far later than he should have when he remembered that he'd had to pull her across Will in order to do it. He dropped his hands where they had cupped her face but she stayed there with her hand braced on Will's leg and her face sleepy and confused.

"Are you hungry?" Jem asked her and the abrupt topic change made her frown.

"I'm hungry," Will said and everyone pulled back. Not far, just far enough that they weren't touching. He was rapidly covering an expression that might have been alarm or even horror. It was gone by the time Tessa turned the confused look at him. He gave her a pleasant smile that approximated normal far better than anyone else's expression did.

The food was microwavable dinners that Tessa picked at and Will declared disgusting though he ate three. Jem told them what had come out during the meeting though it wasn't much that they didn't already know. It comprised how the warlocks had been contacted anonymously and the Clave records of what had happened in Melbourne. The Melbourne records were spotty as after the uprising the city had closed its Institute and operated as a satellite of the not terribly large Sydney Institute until 2013.

Tessa collapsed into bed again and Jem left Will in the spare room after a brief lesson on how to use the shower and the rest of the bathroom before he went to join her. He wasn't sure if he would be able to sleep but he dropped off before he'd laid all the way down.

Tessa had washed her hair three times to get the scent of fire out of it before she'd braided it back and let it drip onto her shirt. If she had stopped to think she might have chosen a different outfit than the shorts and the tank top but she was still thinking through a fog of exhaustion. She could move without her muscles screaming but she was a long way from feeling like herself.

When the kitchen door opened, she thought it was Jem back from the emergency shopping trip he'd taken. Her smile broke before she'd even looked up from the book she'd spread on the table though she wasn't alert enough to truly read. It wasn't Jem.

It was Will.

He looked far too normal to be a time traveler or a survivor of multiple demon attacks only the day before. He must have washed his hair because it tumbled over his forehead in waves instead of snarls. It had been too dark and she'd been too distracted to really see the colour of his eyes the night before.

They widened just a fraction when she stood up. It reminded her too late that she wasn't wearing something that one should entertain in. She'd already made it halfway across the room by that point. By the time she'd considered going to get a robe she had thrown her arms around him and he staggered just a little under the force of it.

"I thought I had dreamed you," she said in a soft voice.

"While I recommend dreaming of me as I am rather wonderful, I do seem to truly be here," he said with a little laugh that wasn't quite happy. She pulled him in a little closer and he finally squeezed her back. He smelled like Jem. He'd borrowed the clothes and the soap she realized but that scent was enough to surprise her. He didn't smell like Will who had used soaps that had long ago become unavailable and had worn clothing that had been washed by hand in lye soaps.

She let him go but didn't step back. He held her gaze. She couldn't have said who was that held the other in place but neither moved back. Her fingers found their way to his hair and then down is temples to his eyes where he held perfectly still as she traced the shape of them very lightly. His lashes against her finger tips were butterfly light.

"I don't remember you like this," she said.

"You don't remember me?" he asked.

"I remember you. Of course I remember you but the you I remember is older. When I remember you, I remember you with gray here and laugh lines around your eyes. I would have said they'd been there since I met you but I guess not," she said rubbing her thumb along the skin near his eyes. "You look more like," she started but then shook that thought out of her head because it didn't bear saying. 'You look more like Jamie than I thought you did,' was not something she could say to him.

"You're managing the differences well," she said because she couldn't fall silent.

"I considered running off and hiding behind drapery. Perhaps I could spend some time cowering until a servant found me but as you don't appear to have any servants I was left with having to manage," Will said. The comment was absurdly specific and it took Tessa a long time to place it.

That was what Nate had done.

When he'd found himself among the Shadowhunters, he had run off and been found by Cyril - no, not Cyril, Thomas, Thomas had told her where he was and it had been the last time she'd spoken to him before he'd died - Nate had been found by Thomas hiding behind a drapery.

And suddenly it crashed into her. The fog cleared and she was left with the stark truth. It wasn't an idea or a possibility. It wasn't a fever dream or a case of mistaken identity. This wasn't a boy who looked like Will. This wasn't a whispered conversation that maybe he was here. No, this was Will. Will at the very beginning of his life. Will who didn't know that they'd been married. Will who had only just escaped his curse. Will who was solid under her hands.

She ran her hands down his arm and found the place where the spiraling scar should have started but didn't because it wouldn't happen until he was in his thirties. She found the training scar on the back of his hand where he had dropped a throwing knife while trying to show off. He had told her that story while laughing. They hadn't been dressed at the time. She found the space on his arm where the rune for marriage was not and resisted tracing the shape of it with her fingers.

"Tessa?" he asked and when she looked up at him, his expression was all concern. He'd looked at her like that when she'd been talked into going to Idris to help one of the Lightwoods manage Downworld affairs in war torn areas of Europe where the Clave was trying to regain control of the wannabe warlords and that one errant pack werewolves running amok. He'd looked at her like that when she'd gone into labour early with their second child.

Her vision blurred.

"Tess," his voice was different and she realized she was crying as he pulled her in so that her head was against his shoulder. He'd been home for so long and it had taken so long to rebuild her life without having him there. She pulled back from him and he let her go reluctantly. His hands still held hers and she was loath to break that last bit of contact.

"I'm sorry," she said in a voice that didn't quite sound like it belonged to her. She turned and left the room. His touch stayed with her as she fled like his skin left residue.

In the bathroom she tried to wash her face but crumpled down to sit on the edge of the bathtub and attempt to smother the worst of the tears with a towel. She reached down for all the ways she had found to keep her emotions in check but all those methods had been learned in the years after she'd lost him. They shattered around her because he was here. He was here and he didn't know who he was yet. He was here and he was real and he wasn't really her Will yet.

Will stood in the kitchen pushing buttons on things and listening for Tessa. She wasn't crying any longer but he didn't know where she was or what she was doing.

He discovered that the dials on the stove allowed you to light it. He'd almost set his arm on fire with that discovery. The little box with the glass door lit up and the tray turned but he had no idea how it cooked anything. The radio was his most recent discovery when Jem made it home.

He didn't know that the radio itself was nearly 40 years old and had been built behind the iron curtain. It had moved with Tessa through multiple apartments. Jem found him playing with the dials to find different stations and making faces in reaction to the music and the news. When he came in the room, Will turned the machine over in his hand twice before he turned the volume knob down to zero. It wasn't quite off but it did the same thing.

"Something's wrong," Jem said.

"Am I that easy to read?" Will asked.

"Not to most people, just to me," Jem said.

"Even if I lived to be atrociously old, I've been dead for 50 years. More likely, I died in a ditch before I was 25. You haven't seen me in a long time," Will said.

"You did not die in a ditch, you asshole," Jem said in that placid voice he used whenever he thought Will was being unreasonable. "Still, something's upset you," he spoke as he pulled food and boxes out of a bag and dumped them over the counter. It was a clear sign the conversation about Will's death was not to be opened. Jem was probably right, he probably didn't want to know but the morbid little bit of curiosity crawled up his spine.

"It's nothing," Will lied effectively to everyone else but Jem had always accepted his lies rather than believed them. Now he didn't accept the lie. He looked at Will and pulled himself up to sit on the counter top and look at him.

Will couldn't explain what it was that was bothering him. Tessa's skin had still been warm and just a little damp from her bath when she'd thrown herself into his arms and his stupid mind wouldn't stop playing that moment for him over and over again. That moment where she'd caught herself against him the night before received almost as many showings. She'd been close enough that he had felt the way her stomach muscles tightened and he had been able to watch exactly how her jaw had moved to answer Jem's kiss.

Jem had been so careful and polite after that moment. It had been a brief glimpse into the little world they'd only started building when he'd seen them last. Tessa had looked so surprised when he'd pulled away from her, like she'd forgotten that there was anyone else in the room. Jem had held her attention utterly. Will's heart broke all over again.

"I made her cry," Will said which wasn't the whole explanation but it was the thing that had been needling his conscience since she'd left the room in a flurry of tears and apologies.

"Does that surprise you?" Jem asked.

"I was hardly expecting it," Will said.

"You died, not in a ditch and not drunk or any other ridiculous story you want to tell yourself but you did die, William," Jem said it very directly but there was weight in the words.

Will's instinct to turn it into a joke faded. He had been expecting Jem's death since they'd been introduced and even so the idea of it had never been tolerable. He'd feared losing him, he'd had nightmares about being left alone in empty rooms, he'd imagined the day but he'd never accepted it.

And for all that preparation, Jem had been the one to live it. He'd been the one who had to live on alone. Will swallowed down every smart ass comment that his mind threw out. He would not want to hear sarcasm from Jem if it were Jem standing in his kitchen decades are his death.

"It's not an old wound," Will said trying to imagine that loss if it had been his. If he had lost Jem and not the other way around.

"It is," Jem said with a sad smile, "But old wounds can still cause pain. You were important to her. You still are. Even if you weren't standing here, you would still be important to her. We lost you, we continue to mourn you and now you are here. I am so glad to see you again that I haven't started crying yet."

"Were you planning on it?" Will asked noting but choosing to ignore that easy use of 'we' again.

"No, but I'm expecting those emotions to hit me soon," Jem said with an elegant shrug. He waved Will over and when they stood face to face Jem took his shoulders and smiled. Each time he did that he forced Will to accept that those dark eyes were Jem's and the colour didn't matter. Jem started to speak and stopped twice. Sitting on the counter made Jem just a little taller than he was.

"What?" Will asked.

"Do you want me to ask her to stop touching you?" Jem asked and Will's stomach lurched sideways.

"Don't look at me like that, you've done nothing wrong. I just," Jem stopped and closed his eyes for a moment. Will found himself doing the thing he always did when Jem wasn't looking. He checked to see how dark the shadows under his eyes were, how pale his skin was, if he was breathing evenly, if there were tremors in his wrists. Nothing. Not an inch of evidence that he had ever been ill a day in his life.

"If you ask her to stop it would sound like a rebuke. If I ask it will sound like jealousy," Jem said. "I'd rather she think I was jealous than think that you were upset with her."

"Are you?" Will asked.

"Jealous?" Jem asked, "No. Are you upset with her?"

The truth was that yes, she upset every rational thought he had ever believed himself capable of but the second truth was that he didn't want to give up the chance that she might throw herself into his arms again.

"No," Will said, "You don't need to ask her to stop on my behalf. She hasn't done anything that made me uncomfortable."

"Like pull someone into your lap and kiss them?" Jem asked.

"That was interesting," Will said in as flat a voice as he could conjure up.

"I apologize for it. It was wildly inappropriate and I will not do anything like that again," Jem said squeezing his shoulders and looking like he meant it.

A traitorous little voice came from the same place in the back of Will's mind that insisted on reminding him that Tessa had bit her lip the same way after kissing Jem as she had before wrapping her arms around him. The voice told him that maybe it wouldn't be so bad if it did happen again. Will nodded because he didn't trust himself to not let that voice out to ask the things it wanted to know about Tessa's lips.

Jem looked at him in a way that told him more than he had expected. It succeeded in blowing the thoughts of Tessa's mouth from his mind. He'd put in so much effort to be make sure this would never happened.

Jem knew.

"Did she tell you?" Will asked.

"No, you did," Jem said. "I should have seen it. You're supposed to be easy for me to read after all. Once I knew, I couldn't imagine having missed it but I did. I found out on my death bed," his expression went from calm to distressed to artificially cheerful in a split second, "That's another story though, right now it is 5 in the morning and I need coffee before anything goes wrong today."

"I should give you lessons on deflecting topics of conversation. Honest people are terrible at lying. That was not artfully done," Will said.

"I'm not lying, I need coffee. Yes, I also don't want to talk about anyone dying. Both things can be true," Jem had been holding his shoulders the whole time. His hands were warm through the thin fabric of the shirt. Now he turned him and shoved him gently across the room. "Go get me mugs and the thing that you put milk in, the little jug thing. And sugar. You like stupid amounts of sugar in things don't you? There should be sugar on the second shelf in a little bowl that matches the jug thing."

Will pulled them out and laughed. The little jug and bowl did indeed match. They were made of fine white china though it was obvious that the handle to the jug had been glued back on at some point in its history. They were painted with a pair of rabbits. The dyes from the paint were just faded but not indistinct.

"My parents had this same set. I think my mother's mother gave them to her or some such thing. I'll bet these came from the same shop. If that's true these must be close to two hundred years old," Will said.

"Probably, Tessa doesn't own dishes bought in the last fifty years. The flatware is a rather odd collection," Jem said.

Will put them near the gurgling contraption that was beginning to smell like coffee before settling in to watch Jem cook with a kind of fascination. It wasn't that he was particularly good at it or particularly bad at it. It was just that cooking was not a thing that gentlemen of good breeding did. Other people cooked. A lady might bake but not a man.

He got about five minutes of watching before Jem started giving orders. The first few instructions were easy, chopping things into small pieces wasn't difficult. He hadn't thought breaking eggs would be difficult either but Will hadn't cracked an egg since he was ten years old and had helped his mother make Christmas tarts.

Jem leaned over the dish when it was done, his shoulder bumping Will's. He'd only done it a handful of times but it was becoming a comfort. The warmth and weight of him when he leaned in pulled all of Will's attention.

"Omelettes aren't meant to be crunchy," he said and Will responded with a swear word but picked out the bits of shell that had fallen inside and then wiped his fingers on Jem's sleeve. Jem responded to that with a different swear word and Will thought that was the worst he would get.

It wasn't. Tessa walked into the room just as Jem blew a spoonful of flour into Will's face. There wasn't even flour in any of the recipes they were using. He'd pulled it out for the purpose of flinging it around.

Tessa said a completely different swear word as she back pedaled out of the room.

"Madhouse," Tessa said from the hallway. "Flour will catch fire you idiots, if you burn down my house after last night I will never forgive you."

"You'd forgive me," Jem said kissing her on the cheek as he walked by to put coffee things in the other room. He'd simply dropped the fight when she'd appeared. Will brushed white powder out of his hair and off his face. Tessa smiled at him from the doorway and it was a smile that made his heart rate change. It was a smile that spoke of a home he would never get to have.

This place was a home and with the two of them in it it was obvious that it was their home. The colours were rich and varied, greens and browns, reds and purples, a splash of yellow in the form of a silk banner that hung from one wall. The books and the music stand and the art were all theirs. The space felt personal in a way that the drawing rooms that Will was used to never did.

Will drank his coffee but didn't try to fill the silence as it stretched. It was awkward and then it wasn't. He had sat in silence with Jem hundreds of times without the need to fill the empty spaces with nattering. The questions he wanted answered could wait. There wasn't room for him here but he liked the idea that he could pretend that this was his home too.