Tessa sat with her hands wrapped around her phone and a worried frown on her face. Her grip tightened and her knuckles whitened. She had dialed every number she had and had called around to find the ones that she didn't have saved. Everything had failed.

"Where did she go?" Tessa asked and Jem didn't have an answer for her. She had been swinging between worrying about Will and trying to find Natasha for the past few days but the panic about Nat had crested this morning. Nat hadn't come with them when they'd crossed through the portal. Jem couldn't remember seeing her at the battle outside the church and Will hadn't seen her since he'd pushed her out of the gap Tessa had made in the barrier spell.

"She doesn't disappear," Tessa said to him. He sat close to her without touching. She was too keyed up for any offers of comfort he might make to be accepted. Without really intending to he had positioned himself so his body created a wall between her and the world beyond them. He watched her and waited for her to ask him for something he could give her.

"Maybe she did this time, it isn't that impossible to imagine. If she was deeper in this than you thought maybe she went to ground to avoid the Clave. Stranger things have happened," Jem said.

"She doesn't have the discipline for going to ground. Neither does she have the self-preservation instinct. She managed to get into trouble with the mundane mafia in the 1980s and I had to drag her out of Europe because she just kept making it worse. She sent the guy who tried to kill her flowers," Tessa told him shaking her head.

In another context it might have been a funny story but Tessa didn't laugh as she told it. She leaned back against the cushions and stared at the ceiling as she tapped the phone against her knee. Thoughts rushed across her face without being given voice. Jem knew her well enough to understand the type of things she was thinking even if he didn't know what the content of those thoughts was.

"If she's gone to ground, someone else took her there," Tessa finally said.

"Where are the other warlocks? Did she go with them?" Jem asked.

Tessa rattled off a list of names and locations. The four who had come back to the Institute as well as six others she had found in her efforts to find Natasha. He hadn't realized that she had been putting that much time into it. Aside from Natasha and the mysterious Dmitri, Tessa had found all but two of the warlocks who had been in the church. Jem didn't ask if she had passed that information on to Maryse. He suspected that she hadn't. Magnus maybe, but not the Clave and Tessa would always see Maryse as the Clave.

Tessa sat up and looked Jem in the eye. Her nervous energy drained out of her. Her emotions were like thunder clouds building slow then clearing to blue like summer storms. Flashes of anger or anxiety rattled through her and then blew away to leave her calm and collected again. Jem often felt like he had to recover from his own emotions whereas Tessa just let her feelings go. He never knew when the storm would break or what would cause it but it always happened.

"I can't remember anymore what I did without you for so very many years," she said to him. He startled at the change in topic and was momentarily speechless. She smiled and kissed him carefully, "You're supposed to be meeting Will and I need to go talk to someone down in the Bronx with connections in Milan. Bring me home something for dinner."

He nodded and they were held still for a moment. Her eyes were bluer than usual. Then she leaned in and kissed him again before leaving him alone in the apartment to wonder at the strangeness of the woman he'd fallen in love with and where she was going.

If Tessa's emotions were summer storms that built slowly and blew themselves out fast, Will's were a hurricane. Will's emotions fed on themselves and spun and spun and spun until he'd gone from worried to a surly wreck. He hid it well but Jem could see it even better now than he'd been able to when they'd been young.

After making the mistake of cooping himself up with Will's hurricane of anger and disorientation in the training room for over an hour, Jem pulled him outside. They found a balcony that looked over the courtyard and the city beyond. Will sat on the railing and glared at New York. Jem leaned on the pitted wrought iron beside him and ignored the waves of misery beneath the confrontational body language.

Jem didn't talk. With Tess he had been silent because he didn't know how to fix her problem but with Will he was silent because he knew that Will would break the silence when he was ready and wouldn't talk until he was. Will tugged at the sleeves of his gear because it was borrowed and the fit was different than he was used to. Usually it wouldn't have bothered him but today he seemed intent on being bothered by everything.

Jem had found him to be more like his cursed self than he had been in his entire life after it had been broken. Defensive and short with everyone. He wasn't nasty as he had been once but he was unpleasant. Jem knew how to weather that Will better than anyone else and he was surprised to find it almost endearing, aggravating but endearing. Not unlike like a puppy. Will was a puppy growling and pretending to be much meaner than he truly was.

"What happens if I don't go home?" Will asked. "What happens if I do go home and know things about the future that I shouldn't know. What happens to Now if I change things Then?"

"I don't know," Jem said.

"Shouldn't I be rewriting history? I'm gone from Then," he said then as though it were a place name, "I must be able to go back or Jace shouldn't exist. He's related to me. At some point that means I must have progeny, there aren't any other Herondales. I'm the last one. Unless the name got picked up by an ascendant sometime after I died."

"You and Jace are related," Jem said keeping his voice level and not looking over at Will. He didn't have answers to questions about how history fit together and whether or not time travel could destroy the way the pieces fit.

Jem's phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket to read the message that said Tessa was going to be a little later than she'd expected. Will dropped off the rail and came to lean over his shoulder and look at the screen. He never touched the little device but he watched Jem each time he used it.

Jem had started it but Will kept up the casual and frequent little touches when they were alone. Jem thought Will might be doing it as an attempt to acclimate to what he assumed to be a modern custom. Sometimes he just seemed to be seeking contact with another person as though to assuage his own loneliness.

Whichever it was, Jem never turned away the shoulder against his or the arm dropped around his neck while they talked. Will leaned against the rail beside him as much as he leaned against him. Will watched him type out the response on the tiny little screen. When Will smirked at his inability to not hit too many letters at once - something he was sure he would never master - Jem pushed his hip out to the side and knocked Will off balance.

Rather than growling or retaliating, Will simply laughed and resettled himself into place against Jem's side. Jem had found the eye of the hurricane that was Will's mood, not a true break in his temper but still a respite.

"Aren't musicians supposed to have graceful fingers? There is no F in that word," Will said and Jem silently handed him the phone and gave him a wave to say 'go ahead and try.' Will promptly hit the wrong part of the perfectly smooth screen and brought up another screen that he frowned at.

"What did I do?" he asked.

"Opened the phone book," Jem said.

"How do I close the phone book? Why is it called a book and not a list?" Will said.

"Because before we had tiny phones they had big ones that didn't store the numbers so they were printed in a book," Jem said and he reached over and put the screen back to the half finished message to Tessa, "Here."

"And who invented this distribution of letters? Wouldn't it be easier to find them if it were alphabetical?" Will held the phone in one hand and used his index finger on the other to tap each letter as he found it. He didn't miss as often as Jem did but he was comically slow.

"Keyboards are always laid out like that," Jem said with a shrug. "Mundanes invent these things not me. It makes sense to someone somewhere. What did you just send her?"

Will flashed him a grin and Jem lunged for the phone. He had been paying more attention to Will's hunt for the letters than what he had been writing. Will spun out of the way and a brief struggle of keep away ensued before Jem finally wrenched the phone back.

"What does that even mean?" he said pulling up the message which started with his message about picking up takeaway sushi and ended with a fragment of what he assumed was poetry but didn't mean anything to him. When they spoke in books, they spoke a language he didn't understand even if he read all the same novels, he still wouldn't be a part of it.

"She'll understand it. How long until she reads it?" Will asked. Jem had pushed him over and he was sitting on the ground and looking up as he spoke. Both childlike and not. Jem dropped himself to the ground beside him and they leaned against the curling iron design of the balcony behind them and each other.

"She'll receive it almost immediately. She'll read it when she reads it. Sometimes it's immediate, other times she won't open the phone for days and will never read it," Jem said closing the messages. On the backdrop of the phone was a picture of Tessa making a face. Her nose was scrunched up and the very edge of smile was pulling on her lips. He loved the picture and the memory that went with it. It was impossible to tell by looking at it that she hadn't been dressed when it had been taken but something about knowing that always made it feel like the picture was a secret.

"I love photographs," Will said still looking at the screen. His voice was far softer than Jem was expecting. He wasn't really talking about photographs and they both knew it. Before Will could retreat from the topic into the polite avoidance he often used when Tessa came up in a conversation, Jem leaned in a little closer. He held the phone where Will could see it and started paging through photos.

He could barely type on the machine and most of the more advanced functions were just about as comprehensible to him as arcane warlock magic but he knew how to use the camera. The indulgent store clerk had helped him find on that used buttons for photography instead of touch functions. He had hundreds of photos many of them of the exact same subject though the scenery changed.

Will didn't ask questions but Jem could see the expressions on his face change as the images scrolled by. Will's guard was down and the little changes were quick and as easy to read as a book. Jem couldn't remember ever having seen Will like that in more than brief flashes. Even Will after the curse had broken had never been as at ease with Brother Zachariah as he was now.

The entire series of photos where Tessa made faces at Anna and Anna tried to match them actually made Will laugh out loud. He blinked in surprise at a picture of Tessa in a bathing suit and an over-sized hat on a beach in the Bahamas. Another one from the same day where she stood soaking wet and captured in mid sentence after being dumped in the water actually made Will colour.

One of Jem's favourite photos was of Tessa with a cup of coffee curled in her hands while she looked away from the camera at something that had distracted her. She had a half smile on her face and was just starting to say something. Her hair fell in a wave around her and sunlight picked out gold highlights in the dark strands. The light had been just right and it perfectly captured the way he always imagined her to be when she wasn't there. Beautiful, more fully awake than most people, engaged with the world and deep in her own thoughts all at once.

"It's a beautiful piece of jewelry, did you buy it for her when you got married?" Will asked.

Jem looked back at the picture trying to pick out the jewelry Will had mentioned. He almost asked what he was talking about because the only piece of jewelry that was visible in the photo was her bracelet. The gold and the pearls and the shape of the marriage rune were all picked out in the same light that made her hair shine.

"It's nice that she can wear the runes. That's all I meant," Will said as he walls went back up. He thought he had given some sort of offense when Jem didn't answer. Jem couldn't think of how to respond. He would not take credit for the bracelet. It was too much a piece of them for him to say

"Sometimes I forget how little you know," Jem said. They were both still looking at Tessa's half smile in the photo.

"I'd know more if you told me," Will said.

"What do you want to know?" Jem asked.

"Nothing," Will said looking sad and then defiant. Jem could almost feel the change in the air as they passed back into the storm of Will's emotions.

"I will answer any question you ask, I swear that to you but unless you ask, I won't tell you anything. Not about her, not about me, not about you or your family or Clave history," Jem said.

"Should I say thank you?" Will asked.

"Either that or tell me to start at the beginning and I'll tell you everything I remember about the last 140 years from that time Benedict Lightwood turned into a giant worm up until the morning that Tessa's phone rang and we left for Venice," Jem said.

"Benedict Lightwood turned into a worm," Will mused.

"You have made the Lightworm joke more times than any of us can stomach any more. Please don't do it again," Jem laughed. Will joined him and then settled in against him again as he tried to think up better puns. He spoke with his hands as he got more animated and Jem was pulled into it against his will. The game went on to include other Shadowhunter names that could be reassembled and which family member was most likely to be offended by them. Will didn't even seem to care that Jem picked a mid century Whitelaw as the most likely to faint in horror at being called Whiteballs.

"Heronfail?" Jem suggested and then shook his head, "No, I can do better than that."

"Stop trying right there, my family name is venerable and not to be trifled with. You can shut it," Will said.

"Look who's learning modern phrases, you're so cute," Jem said and Will shot back a play on his name that was made up entirely of swearwords before they collapsed into laughter again.

"Thank you for tolerating me. Today, yesterday, tomorrow, our entire childhoods. You have saved my life a hundred times. Even when you don't know what you are doing," Will said and then he reached over and hooked a hand around Jem's neck to pull him in and kiss his forehead.

When Jem had kissed Will on the forehead before he'd done it without thinking. If he was being honest with himself, he did it because it was what he would have done for Tessa if she'd been upset like that. He kept having difficulty separating how he loved Tessa from what were acceptable ways to demonstrate the way he loved Will. They were friends not lovers and what was acceptable in one arena was not in another.

That thought crossed his mind and stopped him from the utterly unacceptable thing he had been about to do. It would not have been acceptable to raise his face and meet the pressure of Will's lips with a real kiss. It simply could not be done. Jem was momentarily caught in Will's gaze and then Will kissed his forehead again and then grinned and pulled a still unbalanced Jem to his feet.

"You're meant to be buying a pretty girl dinner and I am meant to be attending a lesson with a teacher who is so deeply intimidated by me that she very nearly refuses to speak. Your little history book lesson made a bit of an impression. I don't know whether to thank you or curse you," Will said.

Jem's feeling of disorientation didn't entirely go away as he said his good byes and left the Institute. He purchased too much Chinese takeaway and made his way home. The city was quiet as he drove back and tried to think of all the reasons that Chinese takeaway should really be called something else as it had very little resemblance to food that people in China ate beyond a few matching ingredients.

"Do you ever have mad thoughts?" Jem asked Tessa as they passed containers back and forth without dishing anything onto plates. The other thought kept climbing back to the surface. How close had he actually been to crossing that line? How angry would Will have been after he'd gotten over the shock of it?

"Like what?" she asked. She rarely gestured with a fork in her hand, her Victorian breeding wouldn't allow using cutlery for expressing thoughts but chopsticks didn't fall under that rule. She would wave them about and point at things with them. She had them raised in an inquisitive gesture.

She had been telling him about her visit with a faerie who had friends in Milan. The visit hadn't been fruitless but it hadn't given her the information she was looking for. One of the still unaccounted for warlocks was in Milan but it wasn't Natasha. Certain fashion houses very discretely employed magic users to make sure that their runway shows caught all the attention they were supposed to catch.

"I can't quite sort it out," he admitted. "I had this thought earlier today. It crossed my mind like a temporary madness but it won't leave now."

"So not temporary," she said. "Will you share this not-so-temporary madness?"

"I thought about doing a thing that is unacceptable," he said.

"He said vaguely," Tessa retorted and looked up in the midst of pointing a spring roll at him to actually see his expression. Whatever smart ass comment had been about to come out of her mouth was replaced with a look of concern as she said, "Who decides what is acceptable? There is always someone to tell you not to do something. How many people have said that your decision to leave behind the Silent Brothers was an unacceptable dereliction of your vows? How many others have called my very existence an unacceptable travesty?"

Jem frowned at her but it didn't slow her down, "If it upsets you, don't do it. If it upsets you because someone else says it is unacceptable, well, you're 152, you can figure out what is right and what is wrong all by yourself."

Jem pulled her in, gesturing spring roll and all, to kiss her forehead. He wanted to tell her why it made him smile, why it meant something different now than it would have before but he couldn't assemble the words the way he wanted to. He kissed her again and then dropped back into his chair and reached out for the fried rice. Tessa waved a finger at it and it slid across the table on its own so he could grab it.

She was calm and collected and all smiles. The storm of anxiety would come back eventually, the longer they couldn't find Natasha, the longer they couldn't understand what had happened with the portal, the worse it would get. Now though, he had a summer evening, calm and safe with just the hint of rain in the air.

Author Notes:

Extended metaphors are fun! Or pretentious. I don't really know!

Jem telling her he was bringing sushi and then forgetting and getting Chinese was originally a continuity error but I left it in because I think it works with him thinking about everything else and now what he is actually doing.