Chapter Text
She lay in the hospital bed with her eyes moving under her lids like she was only dreaming and he sat beside her. When no one else was around, he laced his fingers with hers. He had left her when he went to see Magnus and hadn’t left her since. He had left Magnus’s townhouse staggered and pained and broken and he’d come back to her because she was the only place he wanted to be.
There was no reason to leave any more. If she woke to find him hovering over her, worried and half mad with guilt that he hadn’t been able to do more to protect her, if she woke to that and found herself thinking that maybe he looked at her like that because he cared for her, it couldn’t hurt her anymore. She could look at him and smile and he wouldn’t have to say something to wipe it away.
“I need you to wake up because I can’t do this without you,” he whispered to her. He had dreamed of what it would mean, to be a good person again, to say kind things, to do good things just because it might make someone happy and every one of those dreams had featured her. This person he imagined he could be was a person he thought she might like.
Jem sat with her sometimes and Sophie too. There was so much else going on that no one could stay long but Will came back every moment that he could. If they lost the Institute, he had convinced himself that he would find a way to keep her safe.
When the threat came, when Benedict Lightwood said, “Once we’ve taken over the Institute, she’ll recover and we’ll find her a place of employment. Talents like those must have uses,” Will had done something.
Will had opened his big mouth and blurted out that they were engaged and had been keeping it a secret. Jem stared at him like he’d grown an extra head but he’d already said it and it couldn’t be taken back. It was inexcusable. When she woke up she was going to kill him. He hadn’t done it quietly. She was going to wake up backed into a corner. The scandal of a broken engagement or the prospect of marrying him without so much as being asked.
Tessa didn’t wake and the world kept turning. They found the way around it all and Charlotte didn’t lose the Institute and Will could have kept his stupid mouth shut.
But he hadn’t.
And then, weeks later, she woke up.
Tessa woke up disoriented and asking where she was. She stared and she frowned but she ate and she sat up and she spoke. It was Jem who talked to her first. Will wasn’t there when she woke. His sister had arrived at the Institute only two weeks before and he’d been with her in the training room, arguing about letters and throwing knives. As soon as Sophie had arrived and told him, he’d came running. Cecily wasn’t far behind him. She had been desperate to meet this mysterious unconscious girl who had won over her brother.
“Your fiance’s here,” Jem said with just a hint of sarcasm when Will arrived. It was as though he could see through Will’s facade or maybe because he thought the idea of Will getting married was absurd or maybe he was hurt that Will hadn’t told him. It didn’t really matter. This was the point at which his ridiculous story fell apart. Tessa would laugh and tell them all that it was wrong to call Will her fiance and she could barely tolerate him.
“I have a fiance?” she asked instead. Her voice was small and confused. She looked up with eyebrows drawn in confusion and her fingers twisted in the blanket. Jem’s sarcasm vanished like a pebble dropped into water. It had been meant for Will, not for her and he sat down beside her. He dropped himself onto the rickety little chair beside the infirmary bed and took her hand.
“Tessa,” he said and she looked away from Will. She had been staring and he hadn’t been able to do more than stare back at her. She looked down at Jem’s hand and then up at his face as he said, “Tessa, tell me everything you remember.”
She frowned and looked away from him, not at Will, at the wall. She was only sixteen and in that moment looked even younger. A little girl in a hospital bed. Will wanted to go over there and wrap her up in his arms and hold her safe but he was frozen. She swallowed and started to speak a few times before giving up and whispering, “I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry, it will come back,” Jem said to her and then she looked up at Will with big eyes and held out a hand to him. He was a liar and a monster but Jem had just told her that he was her fiance and she reached for him because your fiance is someone you can trust. Jem left her side and Will took his place. He was a fraud. He had prepared himself for her to call off the wedding she’d never agreed to, to slap him for saying it at all, to be angry and hurt that he had manipulated her while she was dying.
He was not in the least prepared for her to wake up with shattered memories and believe him. He took her hand and held it between his while his mind turned like a water wheel. Round and round and going no where. How did he fix this now?
“I don’t remember your name,” she whispered to him like she was embarrassed by it. She gave him a tiny smile and how much he loved her clawed its way through all his guilt and shame and pushed all the breath out of his chest. He sucked it back in around the heavy flailing thing that must have been his heart.
“My name is Will,” he said smiling at her and for the first time, for the first time since he’d met her, he let everything he was feeling show in that smile. She returned it. She smiled at him like she loved him too. She only loved him because Jem told her that she did, because Jem had introduced him as her fiance, and she had already decided that she trusted Jem. Jem was the type of person you trusted as soon as you saw. Will was not.
Cecily wormed her way onto the bed to sit there in her Shadowhunter training gear and peer over Will’s shoulder at Tessa. Tessa looked up at her with curiosity in her eyes but no questions yet.
“So you’re going to be my sister-in-law?” Cecily asked and the scope of Will’s lie hit him again. He had said it for all the right reasons. It had been a good plan, it would have kept her off the streets. But now. Now it was a lie that was stretching bigger and bigger. He could imagine Cecily telling this lie to their parents. It was all made worse because it was a lie he was telling to a vulnerable girl who didn’t even remember her own name.
It was Jem, as always, who came to his rescue and shuffled everyone away. Jem looked back with a harder look in his eyes than was usually there and then closed the door behind Cecily. Will was left with the girl he loved more than air who kept touching his fingers and flashing him little smiles. She looked at him like she loved him because he was lying to her.
“You didn’t agree to marry me,” he said when they were alone.
“No?” she said, “Was it arranged? I suppose that means my family approves of you.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said with a rueful laugh and she reached out to push his hair away from his face because when he looked down it fell in a wave into his eyes. His whole body felt the contact. This was months of dreaming made real. She was pale and drawn but she looked at him like she loved him and it felt so real. It felt so very very real. He wanted this so much it hurt.
“I mean to say, you don’t remember anything, you shouldn’t have to… Until you remember, everything, until you remember everything, I’m not your fiance. I’m just a friend who cares for you,” he said. It was almost the truth, almost enough to undo some of the damage.
“Are you going to take me courting all over again?” she asked.
“Would you like me to?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said with a little laugh as she looked down at her hands again. They sat for a moment in the quiet of the infirmary before she held up her hand and said, “I don’t have a ring.”
“I’m a Shadowhunter,” he said and he pulled his family ring off his finger and held it up, “I’m supposed to give you this to wear up to the ceremony where we exchange runes, not pieces of metal like mundanes do.”
She surprised him by reaching for it and he pulled it back and curled it into his palm. She laughed like he was playing a game and he raised his eyebrows at her. She was still smiling as she reached out and wrapped her hands around his. He didn’t open his fist but he let her draw his hand in. He smiled as widely as she did. It was like it was contagious, he couldn’t look at her and not smile. Her hands were small and warm and not nearly strong enough to open his fingers.
“I want my ring back,” she said to him.
“You have to agree to marry me before I’ll give it to you,” he said.
“I’ve already agreed to marry you,” she said.
“You have? Tell me about the proposal, how did I ask?” he said.
She sighed and laughed and tried one more time to unwrap his hands. Her tongue poked out between her teeth and her fingers trying in vain to pull his apart.
“Very well, so I don’t remember agreeing to marry you but I am sure that I did and I am sure that I will again,” she said then a little shadow of doubt crossed her face. It was not what he expected when she said, “Why would you want to marry me? You’re beautiful and I’m not like you.”
She still held his fist in hers and she turned it to trace the voyance rune on the back of his hand with her fingers. He had let his walls down too far and now there was nothing between his sanity and this pounding fluttery warmth in his heart. Her fingers on his hand were intimate. She could have been running her hand over his bare chest and it couldn’t have brought out a stronger reaction. His stomach tightened and his breathing changed and keeping still and pretending this was normal took all his practice at lying.
“Because you’ve pieced that together without being told. You are smarter than most people. You’re more compassionate as well. Kind when you have every reason to be hard and bitter. You are kind even when people don’t deserve it and you are honest. I am not honest and I see your honesty and it makes me want to be better. You are my warrior queen, my Boadicea, braver and stronger than a thousand men. I love you for all the reasons that a man can love a woman and for all the reasons that make no rational sense. I love your hair when it falls in curls. I love the way you can say complex things with just your eyebrows. I love your name. I love your eyes. I love the way you argue with me when you think I’m interpreting a novel wrong. I committed to memory every word you have ever written and dreamed of a lifetime of words yet spoken,” he stopped himself there. He had let it go on. He had started to ramble.
He closed his eyes and her hands were still wrapped around his, holding tighter than she had before. He tried to steady himself before he said something else mad and unwelcome. She leaned in and pressed a kiss to his mouth. He started and pulled back. She looked at him with wide eyes and parted lips.
“I cannot remember every word ever said to me, but if you have said even a fraction of that to me before, I know why I agreed to marry you,” she said with just a touch of anxiety. She had kissed him and he had jumped away like she had burned him. He felt guilty for a new host of reasons.
Not only for jumping away but because he hadn’t and she hadn’t and her words reminded him. She had never agreed to marry him. He had never given her words of love. He had told her she was barren and inhuman and unworthy of love. He had called her ungraceful and strange and disparaged every book she had recommended for him. He had read every one in secret and tried to see them the way she did but he hadn’t ever told her any thing like this before. He had built them up, day by day by day, he had assembled the words as though organizing them would make it easier to suppress them.
“I love you, Tessa Gray,” he said to her and he pulled her hands towards him and kissed her knuckles. “I love you and I will earn this trust you have in me. I swear, I will be worthy of it.”
She smiled at him like she already loved him and he kissed her fingers again and dropped his head so she couldn’t see his expression as it fell to pieces. Guilt and love and hope and horror and unnameable desire.
“I love you,” he said one more time and she touched his hair again, running her fingers through it and pushing it away from his face. He hid his expression by keeping his lips pressed to her fingers and his eyes on the blanket.