AN: OT3 Fluff explosion. :)

Tessa reached for Jem when she woke and found his side of the bed empty. It was so rare that he was the one to wake up first. She shivered as she climbed out of bed. She wore pajama shorts made of soft fabric with music notes printed on them. She dropped a long sleeve shirt on over her tank top because somewhere they had left a window open the night before and the early morning air in the apartment was just a little bit chilly.

She pushed her hair out of the braid it had spent the night in and shook it loose as she padded to the kitchen to put on coffee. A tiny bit of unease was there because Jem did not wake up early and if he did he certainly didn't do it without coffee. She talked herself out of worrying as she set the machine to make a full pot because he always drank more than one cup.

It was the sliding door in the main room that was open and she went down to shoo the cat back inside and close it. She saw them as she turned around. Jem had his head on the shoulder of a young man that it took Tessa a long moment to recognize as Will. His hair was a disheveled mass of dark curls that fell over his forehead. He wore dark jeans that fit tight and a long sleeve shirt that was made out of something that clung to the lines of his chest. Someone had managed to talk him into eyeliner. It was smudged. He was curled around Jem with his cheek against the other man's hair.

The day before, the conversation about Will and Jem and the kiss had been about feelings and ideas. Now it was a very physical reality. Jem's hand rested on Will's stomach and she could very vividly imagine him using it to pull Will in. The idea of Will's tendency towards thorough deliberate kisses meeting Jem's unmeasured bursts of enthusiasm made her actually stop and stare.

She waited to see if jealousy raised its head. Jem had spent the night curled up with Will and some little voice in her head suggested that maybe she should be jealous about that. It was there but it was a thought not a feeling. Her mind could tell her how the stories were meant to go but her heart had always made its own choices. They were beautiful together and so peaceful it made her want to cry.

She crossed the room and touched Will's hair. He stirred and blinked up at her. His eyes were bluer against the black of the makeup. The eyeliner had seemed silly to her but the shock of the colour against it made it beautiful. It was smudged. He was a devastated angel. Something out of a music video or a post modern play. She took her hand back.

"Shh," she said, "You're going to wake him up if you move."

Will looked down at Jem and his expression was contemplative and a little confused. He looked back up at Tessa and the colour of his eyes stopped her breath again.

He started to reach for her but stopped just as she had pulled back from touching his hair. They could both touch Jem but there was something in the way of touching one another. Tessa sighed and sat down on the sofa beside him. She very pointedly leaned her shoulder against him. Not as intimate as what she had wanted to do but it was a step in the direction she wanted to go in. She would not wallow in this shyness while she had him.

"What are you doing here, dressed like that?" she asked and Will told her the story in a soft voice while her imagination filled in blanks that he left in the story. His arm was around Jem. It had been the entire time he'd been speaking and Tessa found herself fascinated by the way his fingers played absently over Jem's shoulder and arm and even up into his hair. It was effortless. His eyes followed her attention and his hand stilled. Maybe he hadn't noticed he was doing it.

She suddenly understood Jem's heart wrenching offer to leave. She understood that feeling of standing in the way of something that was important. These two were important and every time she entered a room, she made Will uncomfortable. Jem calmed him down and Tessa made him unable to sit still. She understood the urge to take the thing that was making this uncomfortable away even if it was herself. She reached out and lifted Will's free hand and held it in both of hers. She held it tight and closed her eyes. For her the decision was already made. She wasn't going anywhere.

"It is madness that I kissed him," Will said.

"Because he's a man?" Tessa asked, "Because of me?"

"Because he's Jem," Will said, "Not that I'd ever particularly considered kissing men before this."

"I'm the wrong person to talk to if that's your problem. I've always seen the appeal of kissing Jem," she said but that wasn't quite true. She had had that same moment the day after their first kiss where it had felt like a kind of madness. She could remember finding it unbelievable that it was Jem under her hands, pressed against her, beautiful and fragile and stronger than he looked. She smiled and dropped her head against Will's shoulder where he couldn't see her face because that night still coloured her cheeks with remembered heat and a remembered shyness she didn't feel any more.

"It's not that it isn't appealing," Will said and then then smothered a sigh or a laugh. It was an embarrassed noise, like he hadn't meant to say it out loud. Tessa turned to face him. He was looking away from her and his hand, though still curved around Jem's arm, was still. She touched his face and he turned to look at her.

"Sometimes there is simply nothing to be guilty about Will," she said when the look in those dark lined, fathomless eyes finally made sense to her. Will had never in his life had a kiss he didn't regret. He expected to regret it. He expected someone to tell him he couldn't have this either. He hadn't been able to so much as kiss a girl at a party without worrying that he might bring his curse down on her. He was still too close to those days. There hadn't been one time where he'd been able to break away from a kiss and smile at the person in front of him because it had been simple and good.

Her heart shattered. She had been calm and collected and then it shattered. She held his face and leaned her forehead against his and tried very hard not to cry for him. She wanted to make him promises about how it would get better and better still but she couldn't speak in case the tears escaped.

"There is nothing to feel guilty for," she said and then she leaned in for a very gentle, very tentative kiss that he returned with aching sweetness. She pulled away, her hands still on his cheeks and smiled at him. He smiled back, looking down, shy but happy. She kissed his nose which startled a laugh out of him. Jem shifted at the sound and they both looked at him.

"Why does no one in my life believe in sleeping in?" Jem asked looking groggy. He didn't lift his head all the way off of Will's chest, he just sort of turned to look up at them, "Not that you two aren't worth waking up for but couldn't we do this an hour from now, maybe two?"

"Get up Carstairs, I need my arm," Will said.

"So you can kiss my wife again?" Jem asked.

Will looked a little startled and Tessa could see the conscious decision cross his face before he said, "Yes, in fact, that is what I am going to do with it."

The whole exchange struck Tessa as hilarious. The tension, and there had been so much tension, snapped and shattered. She rolled into Will's shoulder and laughed. Jem stretched and twisted and laid down on Will's lap instead. He was too long for the sofa and had to toss his knees over the arm. Jem looked up at them and Will did as he had said and turned Tessa in to another kiss. Jem smiled and then closed his eyes. He truly had every intention of going back to sleep.

"Is he always like this?" Will asked Tessa.

"A little clingy? Lazy as sin?" she said. "Often, yes, he's basically a cat shaped like a man. He likes to sleep 18 hours a day and likes to cuddle. He won't come when he's called but he does always come for food."

"Shut up," Jem said kindly without opening his eyes.

Tessa made that kissy-clicking noise people always used for cats and pet his hair. Jem attempted to frown at her but couldn't keep the smile off his face. The actual cat scampered into the room and looked at her. She had made the noise that usually came with treats. Will looked at the cat and frowned.

"That one looks like Church," he said.

"He is Church," Jem said finally giving up on trying to go back to sleep. He swung back around so he was sitting up. His long legs only barely missed a lamp. He gave Will a little bit of space but Will leaned into it so they were touching again. It was subtle and had that sense of being unintentional. Tessa didn't point it out as they settled back together. She wondered if there was something about the parabatai bond that was pulling them in.

"Your cat came through the portal?" Will asked.

"I think my cat's immortal. We're not really sure," Jem said, "If you two insist on being awake, is there at least coffee?"

Alison was passed out in the spare bedroom and no one felt the need to go try and wake her. Jem had checked on her to make sure she didn't have alcohol poisoning but then they'd retreated into a room with just the three of them. There was an easiness between them that hadn't been there before as they made coffee and toast and sat in the kitchen to eat it.

Will touched. It struck Tessa as a sort of experimentation. He was pushing to see how far he could go and each positive response made him less anxious and more like himself. He leaned in behind her and put his chin on her shoulder to watch how the toaster worked and when she leaned back into him he made a joke about her "mechanical kitchen staff."

He smoothed Jem's hair and called him kitty until Jem shoved him and a little scuffle broke out. Tessa had to dance out of the way and hopped up onto the counter to avoid them. The kitchen wasn't really big enough for three people all moving around, especially when two were trying to push each other over. She laughed and kicked at them with bare feet until they stopped.

"So who is T.C. Eliot and why did you steal his shirt?" Will asked. He sat leaned against the bright yellow kitchen wall, still wearing his black club clothes though she'd lent him enough makeup remover to get rid of the eyeliner. He spoke over the rim of a coffee cup and her heart stuttered at the familiarity of him.

She wore a shirt from a fundraiser the medical clinic Jem volunteered at had run. It had been a baseball game against some other Downworld organization and each person who had played had a shirt made with a joke name on the back. Jem still had his somewhere as well with Bro Z on it. She explained that much and he frowned at her.

"So you are T.C. Eliot?" he asked.

"It's a play on words," she said, "Tessa Carstairs, T.C."

"Why Eliot?" he asked.

"I gave you all those books and I didn't give you any T.S. Eliot?" she asked incredulous at her own oversight, "You love - you will love - T.S. Eliot. He's an American Poet from the 20th century. Melancholic and beautiful."

"He's a miserable bastard," Jem said. Will raised his eyebrows and Jem recited, "This is how the world ends, This is how the world ends, This is how the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper."

Tessa stared between them for a minute and then laughed. She looked at Will but he stared back at her blankly. He was missing the joke. She shook her head, "You are here the day that I win and you're too young to appreciate it."

"Win?" Jem asked. "Win what?"

"We had a bet," Tessa said turning the grin on him. He was trying to be serious but her smile was infectious. "Will and I, we had a bet to see who could get you to quote poetry. It had to be spontaneous. If we asked you to quote something it wouldn't count. You had to do it on your own. God, I had forgotten it until you said that."

"You had a bet about whether or not I would quote poetry while I was a Silent Brother?" he asked. "How long did this go on?"

"Always," she said. "That, right there, that was the first time you have ever done it. There was was the great Hamlet debate of 1907 after you quoted some line at Will. We argued for weeks over whether Hamlet counted as poetry or if a play needed to go into its own category."

"You and Will had about four arguments, ever," he said. "And one of them was about me and Hamlet?"

"It was important to make the distinction but Eliot is unquestionably poetry so I win," she said with finality.

"What do you win?" Will asked.

Tess dropped back into the open chair at the table and pulled her mug declaring that she was a Librocubicularist or one who reads in bed, over to her. She considered him. She couldn't remember what the terms had been. The challenge had been declared unwinnable so long ago that it had really only lingered as a joke and even the joke was a hundred years old. She simply couldn't remember and it made her feel older than she usually did.

"You tell me," she said.

"I'll think on it," he told her with mock seriousness.

Alison interrupted their morning by stumbling into the kitchen looking hungover. She rubbed her face and hair with her hands and then helped herself to coffee without asking. The fourth chair at the table was pushed in against the wall so she climbed up onto the counter to drink her coffee.

"The three of you are a wee bit odd, y'know?" she said.

"I have also noticed that," Will said, deadpan.

"I haven't," Tessa said and they shared a look. What she considered one of their looks. What their daughter had once called the 'parental secrets look.' Will's lip quirked but he didn't actually smile. It would have ruined the flat look he was giving Alison who looked between them and shook her head again.

When Alison went to shower, Jem disappeared from the room. He showed Tessa what he had in his hand and she nodded. He went to interrupt Will. Will was reading through Tessa's battered copy of T.S. Eliot poems and had given her the strangest look when he found an annotation he had written on Wastelands. She shrugged and tried to be unconcerned, "I told you that you've read it before."

Jem rolled his hand over and put a set of keys in it. Will turned them in his hand and then looked up at Jem. It was two keys and a little plastic card on a plain ring. Will smiled at them then he pulled Jem down and kissed him very carefully. Tessa's imagination had provided her with this image but she wasn't prepared for her reaction to actually seeing it.

Her stomach tightened and her heart rate stuttered. A fierce protectiveness rolled through her. They were beautiful and after every awful thing that had ever happened to them, they deserved something beautiful. It was a quick kiss. Gentle and still a little unsure, a thank you in physical form. It made Jem's face break into a lopsided grin and Will kissed him again. An uncomplicated kiss, simple and good.

"Do you want to walk back?" Tessa asked, "Once you've seen the route, you'll remember it. I can show you how to use the key card and everything."

"Are you leaving me to drive the hungover one back to the Institute?" Jem asked.

"I don't think she'd be willing to walk halfway across the city with us," Tessa said and the look she gave Jem was a request. He nodded so she knew that he understood it. He looked a little disappointed.

"Ok but the two of you owe me something good," he said.

"Next time, you can sleep on me until noon if you want to," Will said and the look Jem gave him made Tessa blush from across the room. Will glanced at her and she laughed and bit her lip. Will looked ill at ease for the first time since he'd woken up as though realizing he was standing on the brink of something bigger than he'd expected. He relaxed faster than he had and was back to jokes and smiles almost immediately.

Tessa wanted to preserve the morning in amber and carry it with her always. She had rolled her eyes when Magnus called them her boys but sitting with them like this, she felt that possessiveness. They were hers. They belonged to themselves, they belonged to each other, and they belonged to her.