AN: Hello Jem/Will scene. I'm glad people liked the Jessa scene in the last chapter - I was worried that I'd catch flames for taking that particular couple in that particular direction but hey most of the response has been either positive or at least quiet. I also stopped writing kissing scenes long enough to actually remember that this fic has a plot and there's actually some plot movement in this chapter but then back to kissing.
Will was sitting in the library when Maryse came in with the bundle and dumped it on the same table where he sat. He smoothed the instinctual scowl off of his face before he looked up at her. She was neatly dressed and she had carefully painted blue nails that matched her eyes. Will found himself using her as a benchmark for what counted as respectable in this century.
She gave him a brief smile before turning to her papers and he went back to his book. It felt strange to sit at a table with the woman like they were friends. He didn't think of Maryse as his friend. He was only barely starting to think of Alec as his friend and Maryse was his mother. Will stole little glances at what she was doing.
He tried to imagine having the job that she held, the job that Charlotte did every day. If Jem was right it was a job that he would do as well. He started watching a little more carefully to try and figure out what system she was using to organize the papers.
"Did Tessa learn anything interesting?" Maryse asked. Tessa's name rocked Will back into the moment. He stopped considering the seals on the envelopes and instead tried to push out the powerful memory of Tessa's expression when she had told him she loved him.
"Not much," Will said. "There doesn't seem to be much to learn. The spell that was following me before wasn't there. Nothing much happened."
Jem had driven him around the neighbourhood in his charcoal gray horseless carriage with leather seats and a sound system that played music from hidden places. Will had enjoyed watching the cars go by and seeing the little shops that were tucked into the bottoms of the very tall buildings. It had been much like riding in a carriage at home but smoother and quieter and with far more levers and buttons than were required to control a horse.
Jem had tried to talk him out of feeling anxious and guilty. It hadn't quite worked. Jem was far too kind and he forgave things that should have been unforgivable. Once that had been an essential part of their friendship but Will had hoped that he was becoming someone better. Someone who deserved even a fraction of the support and friendship Jem offered him.
"So are you that angry with Tessa too?" Jem had asked him as they crossed a bridge and headed towards the freeway.
Will hadn't had a response for that. He wasn't angry with Tessa. He was furious with himself for having kissed her but couldn't put any of that anger on her. She had been so immeasurably sad when she'd told him that she had loved him for his entire life. He had taken advantage. The longer he thought about it the more ways he had found to blame himself.
"Jem took me driving on the freeway, it was terrifying," Will said. He hadn't known human beings could build something that traveled that fast. The drive through the neighbourhood had been faster than a carriage ride would have been but hadn't been extreme. The freeway was another matter and Jem's tendency to weave through larger vehicles at atrocious speeds made Will question ever considering him the more stable one. Maryse flashed him a brief smile. She looked like Isabel when she smiled and almost against his will, Will saw her more as a person and less as an envoy of the Clave keeping the doors locked.
"I figured as much," Maryse said.
"And what's that?" Will asked.
"That they were taking you out to play and not to study magics," she said. She had paused and frowned over a letter in her hands.
"And you let them?" Will asked.
"You overestimate my powers if you think I have any ability to stop either of them. Besides, Za- James helped to save my son's life and he did it on your behalf. I still remember the phrasing, 'the debt I owe the Herondale family is deeper than any I owe the Clave.' Silent Brothers do not talk like that. I owe you much more than an opportunity for a Sunday drive. Tessa gave me a good reason to let you out and you are not injured nor has history collapsed around us. Let us all continue to pretend that important magics were studied and we are closer to understanding what happened in Venice," Maryse said with a wave of her hand.
She grimaced at her work as she opened a thick folder and poured the contents onto the table. Will was now fighting for his ability to continue to dislike her.
"You were head of the London Institute," she said.
"So they tell me," Will said in a flat voice.
"So you aren't yet?" she said.
"No, Charlotte Branwell is," he told her. "Considering how they treat her I can't imagine the circumstances that led to her promotion but then I can't imagine anyone being mad enough to appoint me either."
"The Clave is madness and fickle politics. For all that it resists change the political changes are never ending. Aside from politics, the worst part, and you will understand this one day, the worst part of running an Institute is all of this," she gestured at the pile.
"These are all the little things. The complaints, the requests for audience, the petitions and pleas for help. And there are so many you will never be able to manage them all and they will continue to come forever. This isn't even my pile. This is Rome's pile because now I get to sift through everything even tangentially related to Venice. Zachariah couldn't have called in the local Shadowhunters and left this an Italian problem now could he?"
"You don't have help?" Will asked. In London this sort of job had often been done by the entire group of them. He hadn't seen many other Shadowhunters beyond the adult Lightwood children and their friends.
"Have you met Ishaan and Erika?" she asked.
"No, they have been kept far away from my terrible influence," Will said. He knew of their existence, young Shadowhunters left orphaned by the Dark War they had been taken in by the Institute. They were in their early teens, younger than Will but still closer to his age than Jace and Alec were. He hadn't met them though he had seen them being herded out of rooms before he entered them.
"We're trying to maintain -" Maryse started.
Will cut her off, "I know. No, I have not met Ishaan and Erika."
"They're a little stupid. Kind enough in Ishaan's case and a marvelous fighter in Erika's but sheltered in some ways. They are not good choices to help sort correspondence. No one else is technically under my direct command within these walls. The Shadowhunter community is so small these days. There are those in the city I could call on to help and they would be required to come but it would make them cranky to be called in to sort the post," the last two words she said in a very heavy fake British accent. Her normal accent was pure Idris. To a Shadowhunter it was an immediately recognizable accent but to the rest of the world it was somewhere between British and French with just a touch of the singsong rhythm of an Italian.
Will was bored and he was used to this being the sort of task he was called on to do. He could also hear something of Charlotte's need to prove herself without asking for outside assistance in Maryse's voice. She didn't seem to Will to have anything left to prove. She was Institute Head and everyone he had seen speak to her did so with the utmost respect but the uncertainty was there under her words.
He reached out and dragged a piece of the pile from Rome over to himself and started reading. Maryse smiled at him not like he was a problem to be solved but like he was a person.
He looked up more than an hour later when Jem entered the room. He had spread a few papers out in front of himself and was rereading them, trying to make sure he was right before he waved Maryse over from where she'd moved on to New York's business. His pile of discarded messages detailing various complaints was far larger than the seventeen pieces in front of him.
Jem came and leaned over his shoulder to look at it all. Will was so absorbed in the problem that he didn't remember to be uncomfortable with Jem's presence. Jem's promises from the day before that kissing Tessa wasn't something he would hold against him came trickling back into Will's attention slowly. Having a real problem to sort out was a marvelous distraction.
Jem had told him that he knew and had known for a very long time and it wasn't nearly as comforting as it should have been. Will tried to imagine living with that unspoken secret. Something everyone knew and no one talked about. Will very carefully didn't think about that as he waited for Jem's brain to finish turning over the information on the table.
He was sure but Jem hadn't confirmed it so it wasn't true yet.
"When?" Jem asked tapping a piece of paper.
"Two weeks before," Will told him lifting up the sheet to show him the one beneath it. He'd stacked the matching documents up with the oldest on the bottom and the most recent on the top.
"There are gaps," Jem said.
"Mundanes don't send requests to the Nephilim," Will said. "Everything else is accounted for."
Jem leaned past him and read a few of the repeated requests for assistance where they had piled up. He leaned his elbows against the scratched table surface as he picked things up and then started reorganizing Will's layout. He left little spaces in between some of the piles.
"Am I right on the time?" he asked.
"These two disappeared at the same time and she went missing over a week before but otherwise yes, you've got the order right," Will said.
"What is it?" Maryse appeared at the desk and sat down across from them.
"Missing persons," Jem said.
"Missing downworlders," Will corrected, "Look at the dates."
It took Maryse longer to see what Jem had seen almost immediately but then no one else understood the inner workings of Will's brain as well as Jem did.
The dates lined up with the dates that the portals had dropped the Arrivals in Venice. A few days before in most cases over a week in the two unusual ones.
"These are Nephilim," Maryse said picking up one of the little piles. "They're a parabatai team from Idris. They've only been gone two weeks but they were meant to be recruiting so no one noticed until Sergei's wife complained that the Clave was keeping him away for too long."
"Alison and I are Nephilim," Will said, "There's only two of us. Look at the dates on the werewolf here. She matches up with Edith's Arrival almost exactly."
"The spell is switching people," Jem said. "It isn't just pulling people out of time it's dropping others back into their places. Sergei is probably standing on the street corner that Will left and Celina is likely wherever Alison was when she disappeared."
Maryse swore colourfully and Will grinned at her.
Though she thanked them for their help she then told them to leave. Neither of them were officially Clave members and she was going to have to call the Consul and the other Institutes to start tracking this new information.
"Aren't you a Clave member?" Will asked Jem as they walked down the hall. Will felt better than he had in days. He and Jem had solved a problem as they were meant to, as they always had. It felt like there might be some movement on figuring out how they arrived and how they might be returned. Will was nearly giddy with it.
"Retired," Jem said. "Which largely means they pay me to stay out of their way. Ex-Silent Brothers are not a thing that happens. I make normal people rather uncomfortable. That Tessa defies definition almost as much as I do and has something of a history of being contrary to the Clave just makes keeping us out of everyone's hair more of a motivator."
"You've been around a lot here," Will said.
"You're here," Jem said and Will smiled at the way he stated it as a simple fact. "I occasionally stop by to say hello to Jace and the others and Tessa spends almost as much time with Magnus and Alec and that baby as she does with me but as to Clave dealings, we don't get involved if we can avoid it."
"We used to be we," Will said.
"We're still we," Jem immediately understood what he meant.
"We should go on patrol," Will said.
"We aren't allowed," Jem said. "You're under house arrest and I'm not a Clave member.
"Bollocks," Will said. "I can't spend any more time thinking. I need to get out of this place before I start beating the walls and screaming like a Bedlamite. Maryse can't stop us from leaving."
"But when the people she is currently calling show up to ask questions and make nuisances of themselves we will need to be here," Jem said. "Don't start trouble just because you're bored."
"I'm not bored," Will snapped and once his mouth was open words just kept coming out, "I'm spending all my time thinking about kissing Tessa and I can't do that. Either the thinking or the kissing. I am losing my mind and if you say just about anything right now you will make it worse so shut up."
Will bit back the anger as Jem gave him an even look and then a little bit of a smile before he said, "How about I beat the hell out of you?"
"Excuse me?" Will asked.
"I can rather easily take you in a fight right now," Jem said. "You're off balance and I am drastically better than I used to be and I was already much better than you back then."
"Stop creating alternate versions of history, Carstairs," Will said.
"Try me," Jem said.
More time in the training room was not going to solve a single one of Will's problems but he couldn't turn down the challenge. That Jem could manipulate him quite that easily annoyed him but didn't change the fact that it worked. Jem was providing him a distraction from everything that crept back in as soon as Maryse had taken away his problem.
They'd trained together since he'd arrived but they hadn't actually set a challenge like this. They argued terms of what counted as winning or losing and whether they would play to rounds or a single bout. Jem had done this to him once not long after they'd met, before the parabatai bond had been forged. He had such a great advantage in training that he'd cajoled and challenged Will into a fight that he couldn't win. When Jem had started getting worse they'd stopped actually trying to best one another because it stopped being a fair challenge but that first challenge had been a lesson for Will. He'd thrown himself into training differently after that.
He hated to lose and he had been impressed. He worked first to be as fast as Jem was then to be able to match the graceful ways of turning falls into attacks. Bit by bit, he trained Jem's Shadowhunter grace into his own fighting style.
Jem left his shoulder bag in Will's room and went to change into a borrowed set of training gear. By the time they made it upstairs the terms were set and Will was looking forward to it. He'd agreed begrudgingly because though he was loathe to admit it, Jem was better. He knew it but he stood in the room ready to start that fight anyways.
Jem tossed him a staff once they'd made sure there was no one in the room to question whether or not they were actually trying to kill each other. The piece of wood was as tall as he was and he stepped out into the center of the room where he would have room to swing it.
"What's this?" Will asked.
"It's a damn stick," Jem said with a smile that told him there was more to that statement than he understood. He started to question it but Jem took his feet out from under him with an easy swipe of the stick.
"Damn it," Will said from where he lay on his back.
"Point for me. I told you it was a damn stick," he said.
"Ass," Will said but he came up swinging. Arguing that Jem wasn't playing fair wasn't worth it. He'd tried before but apparently Jem's mother was the type of person who taught fairness based on a model that other human beings would never understand. It was probably the reason that Jem had managed to accept his illness without losing his will to live. It also meant he didn't always fight in a way Will considered proper.
He also fought better than Will had expected. Will had expected to lose but not like this. It had taken years of work but Will considered himself to be very good. Jem was better. Jem wasn't just a little better but leaps and bounds better. He was making good on his offer. Will was bruised by too stubborn to back down. Jem hadn't even had to get close. He moved in and took Will down with two or three strikes of the damn stick. Over and over.
"You did not get this good in the last few years," Will said.
"I was a Silent Brother for two lifetimes. That's a lot more than a few years. I'm actually very out of practice. I trained a lot more there than I do here," Jem said.
"150 some years of training," Will said.
"Against your - what is it - five?" Jem smiled. Will tried to catch him by surprise but Jem blocked the strike easily and parried back a few steps before he knocked Will down again.
"You're intentionally being an ass," Will said.
"That may be true," Jem said. Will had gotten to his feet and was moving in again. When Jem lunged in he dropped his own staff and grabbed Jem's. It wasn't enough to stop him from falling but he pulled Jem down with him. He ended up on his back again but this time Jem wasn't standing over him looking smug. He was sprawled against him looking startled. Not a win but at least not so definitively a loss.
"Ass," Jem told him and when Will met his eyes to say something else the look there wasn't what he expected. Will's own comment died on his lips though he couldn't quite say why. There was nothing in the look that Will could put into words. He had stopped questioning that Jem's dark eyes were truly Jem's but he hadn't been close enough to see the little bits that had never regained their colour and still flashed silver like stars in the black of night.
He got lost in them for a moment and he could feel Jem's breath on his cheek. Will laughed softly though he didn't know why and Jem pushed up and backpedaled.
"What were you -" Will started as he followed him out into the room.
"Nothing sane," Jem interrupted him and he looked towards the window without seeming to see it.
"You've still got silver in your eyes," Will said.
"Yes, Tess will tell you something poetic about starry nights if you mention it to her but yes, the recovery wasn't perfect. My lungs are never going to be as healthy as they should be either, too much damage to ever be entirely healed," Jem said and he still didn't look away from the window.
Will hadn't seen Jem off balance in a very long time. Even when Tessa had been sick he had been the stable one, the one giving orders and organizing everything. Now he was rambling about his lungs. Will grinned at him feeling suddenly just as unbalanced but irrationally happier about it.
"What were you thinking?" Will asked him closing the distance. Jem's body language changed, just a little defensive as he felt Will move towards him. Will still wasn't sure what to expect but the thrill of being able to make Jem uneasy made him want to laugh even if he didn't know why he was able to do it.
"Nothing sane," Jem repeated finally looking at him and the pieces of his calm and collected persona were sliding back into place over the emotions underneath. Will sometimes forgot that there were emotions underneath. Jem seemed too calm to have anything unbalanced hiding under the surface.
Will wanted to stop the calm from sliding back in. He wanted to know who this Jem was, this one who shifted his shoulders in discomfort and had a nervous tick in his fingers. Did Tessa get to see Jem with his walls down like this? Was this new, some after effect of being a Brother or had there always been a turbulent person hidden under Jem's easy calm?
Will stepped in so they were nose to nose again and rather than reeling back or shoving him off, Jem fell still and met his gaze briefly. Jem caught him by the shoulders but didn't move more than that. He didn't hold him, he just put his hands there. Contact like all the little moments of touch they had made a part of their time together.
They were closer again and Will couldn't remember how it had happened. Jem hadn't been able to hold his gaze but he looked up again and this time he didn't shy away. The look was back. The look that Will couldn't decipher though he always understood Jem. It held him but he couldn't make sense of it.
Then Jem tilted his head and they were breathing the same air for a moment. A moment that stretched and was both longer and shorter than seemed possible. Jem hesitated but Will finally understood it and answered it not with a look but the kiss that Jem hadn't been able to start.
It was just a brush of lips. Jem's eyes fell shut and then snapped open and Will had a moment of panic that he had misread the look but it was still there and had an incredulous smile to go with it. Jem's defensiveness fell away and he kissed him properly with that smile still on the corners of his mouth. He pulled him in and kissed him hard.
Will could count his kisses. He would run out of kisses before he ran out of fingers. For every girl he'd ever kissed that felt like the right phrase, he had done the kissing. Even Tessa's responsiveness and the way she could demand things with a nuzzle didn't feel like this.
Jem did the kissing. He took the lead.
Will let him. He might have imagined Jem as gentle but there was none of that gentleness in this kiss. He pulled Will in and held him where he wanted him to be and it didn't occur to Will to do anything but follow where he was guided.
The arm around his waist held him close and Jem was strong enough that it felt inescapable. Not that he tried. He had an arm around Jem's neck and the other hand was fisted into his shirt. Jem tasted a little of coffee and Will couldn't remember when the kiss had become so much deeper. His stomach twisted each time he felt Jem's tongue.
Jem paused and they were breathing hard as he caught Jem's face between his hands. He knew it was Jem. It could be no one else. Still, he was surprised to find Jem's partly open mouth and his night sky eyes there in front of him. The real world tugged on his attention but he ignored it in favour of being the one to start this one. Jem responded but didn't try to take back the lead.
Not unlike his failures on the training floor, kissing Jem left him feeling like he was the graceless one. A clumsy child playing at a game he didn't quite understand. Will backed them up into a wall and was surprised out of the kiss by the impact. Jem gave him a smile that said he wasn't doing nearly as poorly as he had feared.
The kisses had been hard. Desire and surprise and feelings that hadn't ever had a shape before. Will considered the depth of his own madness as he looked at Jem's face. The feelings hadn't been intended to have a shape. They hadn't ever needed his attention before. They had always been easy to ignore. He hadn't even noticed that he was ignoring them.
Jem put up a hand and covered Will's mouth.
"Shut up," Jem said. "You're right, you are right about all the reasons that we shouldn't do that. You are. But before you say any of them, before you tell me any of the very good reasons why I can't, I am going to do that again."
Will wasn't entirely sure that that was what he had been about to say but he was certain it wasn't that. He couldn't think of any good reasons why they needed to stop. He nodded because he wanted Jem to do it again and to hell with everything else.
This time it wasn't hard or demanding. It as softer. Will's eyes fell shut and he let himself be pulled down into it. This wasn't desire or shock. It took him a moment to place it but when he did his heart stuttered. This was how Jem had kissed Tessa after the fire. This kiss spoke of love and protection and the happiness that came from just having another person nearby. This was the kind of kiss that Will had been sure he would never truly find.
When he pulled away, his thumb stroked Will's cheek. Will smiled at him and said, "How long have you been thinking of doing that?"
"I don't know. Not long," Jem said. Jem held him easily, like they'd always been this close together. His hand had settled onto a place on Will's lower back where it simply fit. Will pushed a piece of Jem's hair away from his face and let the strands fall back through his fingers. He could feel Jem's stomach move as he breathed.
He hadn't been able to calm himself enough to accept Tessa's attempts at comforting him but this was so utterly unexpected that his anxiety hadn't caught up to what was happening. He let himself relax into the moment. This moment was too impossible to be happening and he didn't stop himself from enjoying it.
"Maybe that's not quite true. Maybe I've wanted to do that forever," Jem said cracking a smile and looking away from Will just a little, "But not in words, not in actions, it never occurred to me until you kissed my forehead on the balcony the other night. I almost kissed you then. I think I've wanted it longer than that but it just never seemed like a possibility."
"There are rules about this," Will said and the real world tugged on the edges of the moment but Jem was nuzzling his cheek as he spoke and the real world couldn't quite make it in through that feeling.
"Neither of us are really subject to them," Jem said.
"Tessa might be bothered that you are kissing other people," Will said but he couldn't find the energy to make it a true objection. He was already lost and he couldn't find his way back. He had spent so long building defenses against his feelings for Tessa but he hadn't thought to build defenses against his feelings for Jem. Now Jem was so far past his walls and it felt too much like coming home for him to want it to stop.
"Tessa kissed you first," Jem said and he kissed Will's jaw as he said it and the kiss lingered before he looked Will right in the eye and he said the next part. They were chest to chest and Will was sure his heartbeat was loud enough to echo off the walls, "You are not other people. We call you our missing piece sometimes. The same piece missing from two different lives. You aren't 'other people' Will, you're a part of us."
The door swung open and Will heard it creak. Jem stepped away from him and was suddenly Zachariah again. He stood tall and serious and raised his eyebrows at the person who had come through the door. Will was still hidden by a rack of swords and he took a little longer to reassemble himself.
"There are envoys of the Clave who would like to speak to you Brother Zachariah," the person in the door said. Will didn't both registering who it was. Jem was answering their questions and generally being the one in charge.
Down in the library they sat shoulder to shoulder, touching but not in anyway that anyone else might notice. Will was surprised to feel more grounded by the contact. The kiss hadn't brought with it any awkwardness. Will kept expecting it and it kept not coming. He was calm. Jem was here and they would manage everything else as it came, together.