Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Dear James,

I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t notice you were hurting. I’m sorry I didn’t notice how much you wanted to be friends—better friends than we were, because I was so caught up in my own insecurities. Because I did notice. I noticed all of it, convinced myself I was insane and creating a fetish of the sad emo boy I wanted to *something is crossed out enough times it’s indiscernible* have I my life. I convinced myself I was wrong and everyone else was right when they said you were on top of the world, living the dream. I should have said something, let you know that I get it. But you know that.

I always thought you would run away from here, somehow, get out of the Shire because you’ve always been a big fish in our small close-knit tank, and you need the entire ocean. You deserve the whole world. Honestly as the years went by I was surprised you stayed, but now I see it: I was right all along, and now I have to live with knowing I could’ve been there for you if I trusted my instincts, but I didn’t. I’m sorry. I hope wherever you are, it’s everything you wanted. I hope it makes you feel free and inspired and so light that you can look back on these years and feel the sort of nostalgia that acknowledges the good as well as the bad and I hope one day we can look fondly on these memories. You won’t be forgotten. I mean the real you, not the persona you put on, the one they put on for you. I hope you can remember me too as someone who didn’t just see what they wanted us to see of you, but made it a little easier to be real. But I know I’m probably too late to try to be that.

So if it’s not too late to say, I get it. I get waking up and putting on a smile even though you want to do anything but because the entire student body is watching and they’re nosy. I get preserving your dignity as much as possible even though yours seemed more untouchable than the rest of us—but all it meant was there was more pressure on you to be something unattainable. I don’t think anyone deserves to have that expectation placed on them. You’ve done enough. You can rest. I hope you know that. What’s inside is worth so much more than your continued achievements.

I miss you. I hope you’re doing well, and if that’s not true at the moment, you’re doing whatever you need to one day get there. I’m sorry we failed you. Please know this doesn’t dictate your life. You’re so much more. I hope you get to grow into yourself, in a way that’s true to you and not just social pressure. I hope I might get the chance to see it when you do. But if not, know that I wish you all the best. That I don’t blame you for leaving.

Love (too little too late but I’m not afraid to say it anymore),

Daisy

James stared at the letter on his desk. He wished so badly that he’d been able to last another year. Finish off the hell they called high school and get his HSC and then maybe leave the country, at least the state. Move to Melbourne or America and study to become the doctor they all expected him to be, or maybe a famous poet or musician or surfer.

At this stage, he’d get to do none of those. He wouldn’t get to go back to school for year 12, and his body and brain were broken, messed around to try to fix him, fix what he became one day when it all got too much.

In another universe he’d skipped a grade when they said he could, or gone to school a year earlier, and he was finished by now. In another universe he was starting university now, a fresh start away from it all. When he closed his eyes he could imagine it in sharp detail, and it almost felt real, the people and classes and places in his head, while he sat there bodily catatonic just to be shaken back into this reality by some nurse coming to check that he was eating and sleeping at at least some point during the day. No, this wasn’t his life. It couldn’t be.

In his imagination Matthew was there at university with him. The details of where they were changed, but the people he talked to felt real. In his dream Matthew was better, healthier, and he didn’t have to worry. In his head they went to parties and clubs once he turned 18 and they never drank too much, they woke up with hangovers and that was the extent of it. In his head it was easy, the way it was supposed to be, and none of the bad stuff had touched them. In his head Daisy had written to him because he truly had gone to study somewhere far away, he had survived and was recovering and learning to thrive and too busy to keep in touch with anyone from his past, really, but he might make an exception to talk to her after she’d been so kind, so understanding.

In his head he didn’t have to reckon with the fact that he’d failed. He’d never get into university now, and he’d never even left Sydney. He looked at himself, sitting on his bed, from somewhere outside his body. No, this wasn’t real. This was some nightmare he was having from his university dormitory. A nightmare of how things could be if he didn’t look after himself, brought on by a bad trip at a party. He’d wake up and it’d be gone. He’d be back in his fantasy.

Chapter Text

Cordelia first suspected something at Matthew's 18th birthday party.

His birthday was in January, making him the oldest in the year, and almost a full year older than Christopher. Whose side Cordelia sat at, half-burnt cigarette in her fingers that she pretended to smoke as he rattled on about someone trying to make cigarettes electric, making it easier to quit smoking.

There was a time where she and Christopher would've been at the centre of the party, before Matthew and James became all cool and popular, and Cordelia started sticking to the sidelines, too big to wear a bikini to swim in public and too exhausted from the world to bother to try to be cool. Before she gave up trying to fit in, just like they did. Matthew and James, the life of the party, the two golden boys of their grade. Who Cordelia had, ever since moving to Kurnell, tried to be 'cool' enough for, spurred on for years by glimpses of an inkling that one or both of them might have that same kind of admiration for her.

But the only one of their trio--back then it had been a trio--whose respect of and general friendship for her had truly shown was Christopher. And now he was the only one who knew the cigarette she was 'smoking' was her father's one that she stole and put out for him when he was so intoxicated she thought he'd end up lighting a fire with it, and the only one who knew that they wouldn't end up staying for the cake because she'd be tired. Too tired of watching James hanging around with the 'popular' kids and making a fool of himself in front of girls begging for his attention, dead eyed because he didn't want any of them, he didn't want to be there. It wasn't him, and Cordelia should've known.

She should've known it when he wasn't at the party.

'He's coming' said the whispers, all around her, Matthew had said he got held up surfing until sunset and then wanted to study before he came, but even for someone starting Year 12 who was on track to be Dux, probably, that wasn't James. The reason he did well was because he put his friends first, and the only real friend he really had these days was Matthew. He wouldn't miss his birthday.

So Cordelia waited, painfully sober while everyone around her got more and more intoxicated, and she waited. It was because she was designated driver, the only one of the little duo who had a licence (Christopher's test was booked a week from now) and the two of them couldn't afford an Uber. That was what she said, and it was true, among all the rich girls she'd take being the token poor person of colour over the girl who didn't dare drink because of her alcoholic father. But the truth was Christopher could easily have asked his sister Anna to pick them up, and she would've. Heck, even Cordelia's mother would've. But she was fiercely independent even at seventeen and even more fiercely liked to be in control of her ride.

Lucie Herondale and Grace Blackthorn arrived, fashionably late, and already high if Cordelia knew how to read the younger girls. It was rare to see James with his sister these days, but back in the heyday they used to be inseparable. The rumours were that Grace Blackthorn had gotten between them. To Cordelia it was ridiculous, seeing their interactions she knew they were still as close as ever, they were just growing up now.

But none of it answered why James' sister had arrived at his best friend's birthday party, when he wasn't even there.

Cordelia stayed another hour after she'd planned to leave, just because curiosity got the better of her. James would show up before the cake, they said, but it seemed like the cake was being pushed back later and later. Drinks were flowing freely still, and Cordelia knew that if she wanted to leave without some drunk tagalong throwing up in her car (because they were always friendly to her at this stage of intoxication, if never in the hallways at school, sober) she needed to leave now.

She and Christopher hugged Matthew happy birthday, got in the shot of his disposable camera, and left. No sign of James.

And just as she thought it couldn't get any more weird, school started and the photos went up and there was one with Matthew with each of his friends, and a handful with James, with James and Lucie and Grace all there. No one could remember talking to him, he arrived late and didn't say much, was the theory, because he had a secret, a secret girlfriend maybe, or he was moving schools.

James didn't show up to school the whole week.

There was a time, James had to admit, where he thought of Cordelia nearly every day. Now, he was mostly just surprised and touched that she, out of everyone they went to school with, was the one who wrote to him, and found a way to have her letter delivered.

He remembered when she first arrived at the school in year 8, a distant family friend who Lucie sometimes wrote to, homeschooled all her life until then. He remembered feeling the pressure of being the only one in their grade who knew her--was she going to be this socially awkward stereotype of homeschooling, forcing him to walk her through the baby steps of making friends, and learning how to be cool? Would she even want to be cool at all? He cringed now at his past self's judgemental thoughts, but he should practice self-compassion, at the time, he was only thirteen. And he needn't have worried. She had walked into the school like she owned the place, all the boys quickly enamoured by her and her--endearing and sexy, she made everything endearing and sexy--eccentricities and stories from her travels. He remembered feeling jealous. Cordelia had been his discovery first, how dare they all turn her into the newest group obsession, someone to put on a pedestal while they were new and shiny and then let go of the minute they stopped being new?

And put her on a pedestal they did. James had gotten angry and irrationally jealous, unable to trust himself around her because even then he knew that's not how you treat someone you respect. He wasn't someone who was used to having competition he didn't know how to beat, and he was ashamed he even thought of her as something to compete over in the first place.

But, he supposed, she got it. She understood him in a way, and really he always should have known, should have talked to her, and maybe things wouldn't have ended up as they did. Daisy hadn't only swept through the boys' hearts when she came, but for years she'd trounced all of them academically. Dux of Year 9 and all of them thought she'd continue it into senior. Until she didn't. Became forgettable. James wasn't sure exactly why, but he assumed he knew more than most. He wished he didn't forget her, too.

And so he went through his day, so different from what he was used to. He worked out by doing push-ups on the floor, sit-ups with his toes hooked under the edge of the bed, because he wasn't trusted with something as simple as weights. And he thought. He thought a lot. About how from the get-go it seemed like he'd been living someone else's life, branded as 'smart' from the start, from the early 90s when all they talked about was self-esteem and how this should raise his. Instead all it did was give him no choices about how to live his life. 'Gifted' they called him, while all he wanted to do was prove to them it didn't mean he was socially awkward as well. And so he became good at everything.

But everything came with a cost, and like they learned in chemistry, energy can be expended quickly or slowly. He burned fast. He burned out.

He felt a sudden wave of respect and admiration for Cordelia then. Maybe, just maybe, she understood. Maybe, just maybe, she was stronger than him because she didn't let it stop her and didn't let it make her not graduate--just fade into the background, until they forgot about her. He wished he could move on, like she did. He wished he had it in him to even write her a letter in reply.

He wasn't ready to pour out his heart though, but he was incapable of saying anything else.

She'd forget him, just like everyone else probably already had by now.

Chapter Text

Really, Cordelia grew suspicious long before Matthew's party.

She didn't remember when it started or exactly what tipped her off. Year 9, she thought, maybe it was that year 9 math class where the teacher seemed to have it in for Matthew and James, when she watched his, ever the people pleaser, spark die out.

Matthew just got rebellious that year, going from the beloved mayor's son to the class clown, putting on a vigilante persona reminiscent of Captain Jack Sparrow years before the movie even came out. Cordelia remembered how he was the advocate for all students against that awful teacher, the teacher who for some absurd reason seemed to favour Christopher and Cordelia. That was the year he got popular, she thought. When he grew into his looks--not that she ever thought of him that way--and James would soon after follow.

But the James of that year just became moody and sullen. She heard it in his piece at the annual piano recital, which apparently--and she still remembered the awe it inspired in her at the time--he'd composed himself.

Cordelia remembered catching him in the art room at lunch, painting with haunting dark greys while Matthew filled his canvas with colour. James quit art after that year, choosing to focus on music and poetry and surfing, but Cordelia never quit worrying.

And nowadays, she couldn't help the dread, the feeling of wrongness, that seemed to envelope her in the hallways and walkways of the school. The anticipation that she'd turn around at her locker and James would be right there, like he always was, and everything would be alright--not good, but manageable--and instead of hearing rumours she didn't believe, she was back to hearing diagnoses and perceptions of James' life she didn't believe.

Back then, how easy it would have been to just talk to him, talk to him like she could've in the early days when they were still close, tell him that if his life wasn't all rosy like everyone assumed she was there.

Now she had no chance because he'd moved schools, and the only people still in touch with him were Matthew and his sister.

At least they said he'd moved schools. But the way none of them had seen him in his new uniform after school, or surfing on the weekend, said something far more sinister. The way Matthew seemed almost too happy, almost too in on the act. But why would they pretend?

Now, in late February, it was two years since Cordelia found out about her father's illness.

Two years since Alastair left, going to stay on the university dorms with his scholarship money and leaving her with nothing but a note.

No conversation, no anything saying why he left or everything he'd been though as a child, just a letter, a letter explaining everything he was never brave enough to say.

It's an illness, he wrote. Be kind to him about it, but I can't keep looking after him to shelter you. You're fifteen, you are old enough now to learn about the risks of alcohol now as you start going to parties, and unfortunately what has become of our father makes it a risk, also, to you and me. I have to leave in order to save myself, make something of my life that isn't, implicitly, centred around the drink.

You don't have to care for him as I did. Let him face his own consequences, I don't care. But know that I protected you as long as I could. But we all have to wake up someday.

She remembered reading those words again and again until her eyes were sore. Remembered looking up the campus phone number so she could ring him, as that bastard didn't have a mobile phone, remembered how it took her days of calling before they finally passed him onto her. Remembered how only days later, her father lost his license to a DUI.

Remembered swearing how that was never going to be her or her husband. Remembered how little she paid attention in school afterwards, bombing out in Year 10, forgetting to pay attention to James. Remembered how it felt like everything was wrong and if she watched him going around like a ghost it'd just make it worse.

Even if she did notice he was gorgeous, like one of those rock stars who captured hearts with their captivating looks and gravely voices and emotional lyrics, burning fast before dying far too young.

But Matthew didn't look like someone whose best friend had died. Nor Lucie someone who had lost her brother. And the photos on Matthew's locker were definitely James, and definitely from the night of the party.

She should be happy for him, finally getting away.

James ran his fingers over the letter. He wished he had it in him to write. To even just care about someone else, but his mind was too muddled now, he didn't even care about himself, if all he thought about was dying, how could he bring someone else into that with him? What was he? He had nothing left. Nothing of the life he built to appease them, all dependent on this final year, a year of reaping the rewards for his hard work, a year of achievements and celebrations that would never come. It would for others. He wondered how they fared without him. He wondered if Thoby was even more smug now than he was before, back when he could never quite beat James. He wondered if the school would change tack and show off a different instrument on its awards night, and some other musical prodigy would come out of the woodwork. He wondered if Matthew was happier now, lighter and more able to face life, now that he didn't have to spend every spare moment taking care of him.

But Cordelia had realised he was unhappy. He hadn't thought anyone other than Matthew would. Maybe Christopher, if he thought about it, but it was always hard to tell with that one. Then again, he was close with Cordelia. Maybe between the two of them...

He found himself longing again. Pining for things he can't have. He wished he could go back to his old habits, channel that into everything he did, channel it into catching bigger, scarier waves, into his poetry and piano and studying for maths and science.

He wished he'd never got into those habits, never used the things he was good at like that, wished he'd faced it all while he still could. Wished he'd stood up to the whispers of her 'fall from grace' by saying, that's gonna be me soon, and it's gonna be way worse.

And it was. And he didn't know how to tell her that. That she figured him out before anyone did--and yet he's not where she thinks he is, at some fancy selective school away from it all, staying with a distant relative or whatever story they ended up telling. He couldn't admit the truth.

Cordelia felt like she was simultaneously paying attention to everything and nothing at all.

It felt like she was walking in a dream and yet--around every corner was a memory: James, brushing past her in the hallway and giving her goosebumps. Cordelia, sneaking into the music room to run an errand for her geography teacher and catching James in the middle of a practice session. Mesmerising. He always was. Now she peeked in the window every time she walked past as if his ghost was there, playing that same haunting tune she had stuck in her head. The panic in his eyes the one time they had a literature deadline pushed forward, and he had no ideas and no time to come up with them. The way they sat under the desks to recoup, remind themselves it'd be okay.

James pulled through on that assignment, he always did, but she couldn't help but remember, clarified in hindsight, how each time he did seemed to take a little more out of him.

The hallways were filled with memories, not all of them good.

She thought of vocalising some of these things to Christopher, as Matthew came up to the two of them one day, uncharacteristically distressed.

Matthew, who had been impossibly cheerful lately, just a bit too hyperactive for it to be genuine. Few would notice, but Cordelia did. And for a few weeks now too, Christopher had been less than his usual open self, guarded during lunchtimes and their hangouts. It was as if he was hiding something, badly, because Christopher was bad at keeping secrets like that. (He blurted out that he was thinking of asking Grace Blackthorn to formal before school started, but only once one of the boys asked Cordelia. He blurted out his ideas and inventions all the time, even when he knew she didn't understand a thing he was talking about.)

She figured he knew more than she did about why James hadn't returned to school for Year 12. His mother and James' father were relatives, after all. And that for some reason, he wasn't allowed to tell her what he knew. Christopher and Matthew had that in common, it seemed, and were dealing with it very differently.

It was Matthew, she recalled, who'd started a rumour along with Lucie that James had left to go to a fancy selective school in the city. That the reason they never saw him was because he had to leave so early on the bus to get there and came home so late in the evenings. Matthew, who'd been acting like everything was fine and his best friend was just at another school, well enough that she'd believed him. Matthew, who she'd never quite broken the shell of, even in the heyday when Cordelia was popular and they'd been closer.

Before she found out about her dad.

Now, he was looking at her, distressed, paying no attention to Christopher.

"Daisy," he said, calling her by a nickname she hadn't heard, not from his mouth, for years. Calling her that like they were anything more than casual friends. "Daisy", he said, looking around to check they were safe from eavesdroppers--something that was hard to come by when you were the school's remaining golden boy, Matthew Fairchild. "I have to tell you something."

James could hear notes, sometimes, in his head. It was how he composed, he'd hear something, usually to do with how he was feeling, and it'd be this foggy, shapeless thing, until he sat at the piano or he sang it out. Then it'd take shape.

He'd captured grief and anguish and excitement and boredom and restlessness doing this, but now, the notes in his head and the symphonies they wanted to become were hazy, never corresponding to notes in real life. He sat at the piano down the hall and willed his fingers to play; it was like they were made of lead.

Or he'd think of an idea, and it'd escape him before he got to play it. It was like his thoughts were made of vapour: symphonies in his head that could never be grasped, never be written, never be played.

He returned to his room and stared at the wall, hoping something would come back to him. And then fell asleep, lost in a maze of unformed thoughts, with only one word he could make out: Daisy.

Cordelia wondered what he had to say to her, and if it was about James. It probably was about James--what else would it be--and a brief panic shot through her.

Cordelia had a lot of time to think, recently, and she hadn't been able to get him off her mind. The strange non-appearance at the party, the story that didn't quite add up.

She figured she saw it in hindsight--all the things she noticed but told herself not to acknowledge, the way that, even when doing the things he was good at, he never seemed completely there. Of course he'd been wanting to leave. How could she have not noticed sooner?

And so, emboldened by the anniversary, by all the changes in her life over the last years, last night she'd decided 'fuck it'. Life was short, she didn't know where James was but she knew what she knew and she was going to let him know someone saw him. Someone still cared.

Did Matthew know about the letter? Know about the thinly-disguised love confession it was--how she'd been gone for him since they were children? How she was too busy being what they wanted her to be, and then too sad, to pursue it?

But there was no way he knew about the letter. There was no way he knew, no one knew, not even Christopher or her mother. She hadn't sent it. And now, in the morning, back in the school environment and reminded of the status quo, she wondered if she ever would.

She wondered, sometimes, if if she'd gotten therapy when everything happened with her father, she'd be more herself now. Maybe even sooner. Maybe she could have confronted James sooner, said that she was there for him whenever he was ready to open up. She'd run over these daydreams thousands of times now, but every time daybreak came, she was reminded of who she was and who he was and how that was something that would never go well.

No one got therapy in Kurnell, and maybe that was another reason James had to leave. He had to create a life where he was happy. In the city, where people were less old-fashioned. And now he had everything, and she still had nothing.

"It's about James," Matthew said. And the dread pooled back into Cordelia's chest even as she was back. pulled into the present moment. He knew. She wasn't sure what he knew, what he'd found out about? Her pining? Maybe it showed on her face that she'd written a letter, been more vulnerable than she ever could in person. Maybe he could see through her.

"Is he okay?" Cordelia asked. She didn't know why that was what popped into her head. Maybe because if she thought about it, she'd never really known him to be 'okay'.

Matthew hesitated. He looked at her, then at Christopher, who was calm as if he knew what was coming. Too calm. Cordelia started freaking out.

"No," Matthew said, softer and slower than she had ever heard Matthew Fairchild speak.

What the fuck? Was he dead? Expelled from his new school? What was going on? And why the hell was Christopher so calm?

"The story I've been spreading--it isn't true. I thought that you, as his childhood friend, should know that. I can lie to most people, but I can't keep up the lie to you."

So many questions. Such an absurd thing to say. She'd be dissecting this interaction for weeks afterward--Matthew Fairchild came to speak to her and said some pretty cryptic shit--but right now she needed to know. "Then where the hell is he?"

James remembered it all, and he remembered nothing at all. He remembered it in pieces when it came to him.

He remembered the stern voices of his surfing coach. His piano teacher. His literature tutor, his math tutor, the people he hired with his own allowance, plans made on his good days knowing that his usual self on a bad day would just go along with the flow, because he couldn't let anyone down. He remembered being told to only hang out with successful people if he wanted to get where he wanted in life. And successful wasn't enough to James. He needed popular too. And kind, because he couldn't let his parents down by forgetting the moral aspect of his ambitions.

In the end, the only one who fit all of those criteria was Matthew. Until he didn't. Until he started drinking to much, and James started to worry, but couldn't tell anyone about it because if he thought about it, Matthew was the person in his life who cared about his image the most--and probably was the first to instil that trait in James.

Maybe James should've given Cordelia a chance. Should've worked to maintain that bridge with Christopher--they used to be close, close enough at least, but Kit was in it for the pure love of the game (science, specifically) and not to actually do well like James was.

It was ridiculous, he knew now, after all they were no less people than him, they were better people than him now probably, but back in the day, there really wasn't some huge chasm between them that he imagined. At the end of the day they were still all kids the same age watching the same sunrises and sunsets on the beach, wishing on the same constellations of stars. He wished he could go back and tell his past self what he was learning in therapy now--when he eventually started to open up--that none of these things mattered, but the people always did.

He was told if he wanted to achieve he didn't need any of those distractions. And definitely not love. And it seemed stupid now, because he never got to get any of that success either.

"He's not well," Matthew eventually said. "He's in a residential program to get better, it's not his fault he needed it, but he's gonna come out a better person and I'm not sure he knows that yet. He really didn't want to go. He wanted to be here, even though it was hurting him, so we told everyone he's gone and done the thing that would've been good for him if he hadn't got sick. You see why people can't know this now?"

And Cordelia just stared, and nodded. Said something like "I won't tell anyone of course" because her thoughts weren't there, at school or with James, wherever he was.

Because he was in the exact place her father should be, and those exact words Matthew said, she's heard being screamed over the phone in conversations between her mother and Alastair every time her father did one of the many things that only Alastair had been able to stop him being caught doing over the years.

And she could've asked Matthew then, the words on the tip of her tongue she'd been planning to say to Matthew or Lucie last night. Could you hand him a letter?

But she didn't. She didn't ask anything. She didn't reach out to James, now that her intuition was proven true and she knew he was struggling, even though she was obsessed with him and had been since a child. Even though she loved him, and that was her biggest secret that up until five minutes ago, she'd been ready to let out. Even though everything inside of her was screaming to.

Because he was like her father. She couldn't love him. Not like she knew she did.

"I'm glad I don't have to keep that secret from you anymore," Christopher said later in the day and she knew what he was talking about.

Chapter Text

what makes you think you can have it all?

you set me up just so I would fall

I cannot fade into this grey anymore

while all of these colours unfold

- tina arena, colours

Slowly but surely, James was starting to get some perspective of what he went through.

People here came from all walks of life. James didn’t talk much, but when he told them what he was—to-be dux and surfing champion—they sympathised with not being able to get back out there on the waves. They sympathised with the stigma he’d have to face, the blow to his confidence when he got back to it.

He would, they said. He would.

But it was when he told them about his schooling experience that the answers surprised him.

There were a few generic ‘good to stay in school and do well’ replies, a few congratulations, a few assumptions he’d just go back and do year 12 a year later, maybe at a different school, and do just as well.

But most, doctors and patients alike, thought he’d taken it way too far.

That maybe channelling every emotion he felt into schoolwork rather than listening to what he was feeling and acting on them wasn’t healthy.

That maybe striving to maintain the perfect vision of himself that was planted in him at five years old not only made zero sense, but was doing him active harm.

And James got to imagine how life at school would go on without him, someone else getting each of the awards thought to be guaranteed to be his.

The same system that convinced him to forgo any of his boundaries and give his entire self to serving it got to continue, untouched and unchallenged, while he was written off as a failure, as someone who just went insane one day and never bounced back.

He got to feel angry on his own behalf. He was set up to fall, unrealistic standards placed upon him, a constant workload he could never maintain.

He was never allowed to be a kid; he always had to be James Herondale.

And James Herondale was nothing. It got him nothing. It left him stagnant, stuck with his routines and dissociation and therapies and medication while it preached grandiosity and achievement and passing with flying colours to the next unlucky kid who would—and this was the worst thought—possibly follow his path.

He wouldn’t graduate with his peers, and if only he hadn’t pushed himself so hard, hadn’t been all but forced to—maybe that wouldn’t be the case.

Who ever thought this was a good way to raise and educate a child?

Cordelia was making sense of her life in hindsight: of how much she noticed, but kept under wraps until she questioned her sanity—now, on the other side of Matthew Fairchild’s shocking revelation, she was being proven right.

Maybe that’s why she was drawn to Christopher. They both noticed everything, they were both always processing it.

“What’s up?” Kit said after one science lesson where Cordelia fumbled three questions the teacher gave her, embarrassing herself in front of the entire class.

“Do you remember how James hated science? How he’d drift in and out of class like a ghost, acing every test but even when he fixated on the practical elements, he always looked so bored. And I feel like that’s just the start of what I’m remembering. Walking around with his portable CD player all the time, and teachers let him because it’s James, but his head would be in the cloud so much and he’d flinch if anyone touched him.”

Christopher was nodding, looking thoughtful. “Never understood it myself,” he said. “It’s like trying to hone in his abilities killed his soul. But it wasn’t all the time.”

“He’d walk around looking like he was being bored to death then laser-focus on some exam or assignment or performance or wave as if it was the one thing keeping him alive. And people thought he was happy. Thought what a wonder it must be, to be him.” Cordelia was ranting now, but she remembered.

She remembered whispers in the hallways, of ‘I wish I was James Herondale’. She remembered the way she’d see students’ eyes roll as if, of course he did, when marks were read out and he yet again got 100%.

And the worst ones, but the ones that validated what she was noticing the most, were the ones of ‘he doesn’t appreciate being perfect’ and ‘if he has everything then why does he look so sad?’

But Cordelia understood it, how striving can drain your soul and kill you inside. How feeling like you have no choice and feeling worthless without achievement, too worthless to believe your own body when it told you you had had enough, often went together.

But she never knew how to put it in words: the inexplicable pull of this person gets it, I get him, I don’t know why.

Not when she was surrounded by hundreds of people whispering how perfect his life must be all the time. She couldn’t imagine how awful it would be to hear that being said about you—when evidently it was the farthest thing from the truth.

She heard it now in rumours of his new life at his new school. ‘He’ll be in the news when he gets an ATAR of 100’ someone said. Or ‘I heard he took a year off surfing because he’s gonna take a gap year and just surf next year, before he studied medicine’ and ‘I heard he’s releasing an album of piano songs he composed, like Mozart, and a poem book. Maybe he’ll be the next Delta Goodrem’.

She wanted to scream that none of this was true, but it wasn’t her place.

She watched Matthew carefully, full of smiles and happy stories he probably made up on the spot. His mask was unwavering. Cordelia let herself imagine a reality where everything everyone pretended was true.

But that alternate reality irked her, because the person residing in his body then wouldn’t be James. The real James was human, the real James went through too much with no one noticing and turned to the bottle to cope. The imaginary superhuman her classmates had come up with was as real as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. A children’s tale, that if you’re smart, you get everything you want.

And she was angry at whatever it was that broke James.

Christopher walked by her side after school to the ice cream parlour: they’d ditched the bus going back to Kurnell, and instead opted for ice cream on the beach.

Some kids from their grade were at the beach. Cordelia thought she saw Catherine Townsend’s bleach-blonde hair as a girl in a tiny blue bikini, showing off her perfect figure, stood up to lay out another towel beside a brunette in a red sunhat. Who had to be Rosamund Wentworth—the two of them did everything together. Including band together to either hype up or tear down anyone in their grade who caught their attention.

And right now it was Thoby Baybrooks. Cordelia could see him now, shaking droplets of seawater out of his blonde hair as he chugged some water, and then threw the empty plastic bottle onto the beach. She understood it, how the wetsuits they wore showed off every muscle and crevice of the boys’ bodies—it was enticing to look at, if there was someone you were interested in looking at.

Cordelia had sat in this same ice cream shop many times with Christopher over the years, and occasionally with Lucie and Grace too, watching James the same way the girls were watching Thoby. Not that she’d ever admit that out loud, always making some excuse about the beauty of nature, how Cronulla held a wildness you’d never get at Bondi or Maroubra.

But maybe she could now, to Christopher. Too little too late probably—she wasn’t really one to open up much, until she bottled up too much and snapped. And that had happened a lot recently—she couldn’t think of any other reason for her letter, still hidden under her homework at home, or the things she’d recently said to Christopher. Cordelia wasn’t a gossip, but it felt important now, like she was carrying James’ legacy and she had to correct anyone who had wildly incorrect takes while protecting his privacy around his secrets.

And Christopher, his own cousin, was someone who could be trusted. And Cordelia was desperate for that. Desperate for there to be people around her who didn’t make her feel insane for worrying, for still caring.

Thoby adjusted the surfboard strap on his ankle and waded out through the shallows again. Cordelia spared a glance at Catherine, now settled on her fancy-looking beach towel.

James sat at the dilapidated piano and contemplated the dullness of his life.

He’d long since figured out that middle C was broken, and well, you couldn’t really play much without middle C.

He tried a C sharp diminished chord, just to try something that definitely wouldn’t need it, and was a little dissonant.

The sound that he’d made reverberated around the hallways. Too loud. And he looked at his hand and realised it’d pressed the notes.

Too much. He’d made too much noise. He wanted to disappear. Never be heard. But the thing about being a musician, was that literally everything you did was to be heard.

But James had never really been heard, had he? He did well at things because he had to. He wrote and performed songs because people liked to hear them. He caught waves and participated in surfing competitions because it was a sport that calmed him, and that was a good thing to do.

He chose his subjects because he was good at them, and that’s what people told him to do.

And if he’d gone to school a year earlier, he would’ve set his preferences for uni last September, just the way that people told him he should. He would’ve gotten into whatever course he put at the top, and he’d be buying textbooks now in preparation to start it.

Or maybe he’d be deferring it for a semester, hoping he’d be well enough to start in July instead of February.

It’d be a lot easier if he’d just managed to finish high school.

And he was angry but he didn’t know at who: at himself, for not being able to hold out a little longer, at his teachers and friends, not wanting him to skip a grade so he could instead be with his peers and top of the grade he’s in, at everyone who made these decisions for him maybe. He wasn’t sure.

But how could he be, when everything in his life had been dictated by everyone else, who never could’ve known what was going on for him?

He wondered If he’d have to work his way back to the top again in surfing if he ever got out. He wondered if he’d even bother. He wondered how much harm it was doing him now, to have lost that coping mechanism, lost the feeling of the wind as he carved his feet over the waves.

As he told himself, again and again, that he’d be okay, and he didn’t need to steer himself towards the rocks to the left along the headland, as much as he spent most of the day wanting to once he got into the water.

Now there was no water, no rocks, no sky and palm trees and colour. No yellow sand, no Cordelia’s red hair flashing from the ice cream shop on the hill…

Maybe he’d take up painting when he was here. He used to love doing art with Matthew, before he realised it was just too revealing to have to create things that others would see, and judge. Before he was told it wouldn’t get him a good ATAR, or a career. These things never bothered Matthew, why should they bother him?

But he couldn’t go back in time and ask his fourteen-year-old self that.

Cordelia didn’t know what was stranger, to listen out for James’ name and hear the most outlandish and ridiculous gossip, or just to hear absolutely nothing.

She heard that Catherine Townsend was a secret violin prodigy, and she’d been keeping it secret for years, but now she was going to audition for the orchestra and hoped to easily get first chair. Cordelia wasn’t sure how much of that she believed.

She heard that Rosamund Wentworth had finally ‘snagged’ (gosh she hated that terminology) Thoby Baybrooks (who’d recently gotten a near-perfect score at a surfing tournament on the Gold Coast, apparently). That one wasn’t a surprise to her. She’d seen it coming for months, since Matthew’s party at least. She wondered, bitterly, how long it would last.

Halfway through the term, now, it seemed like everyone had moved on, left Cordelia stuck in the past, where James was still at the school, or where she was still figuring out where he went. Why wasn’t he back by now? It’d been a lot more than six weeks.

She started to think maybe he’d never return, maybe they’d get used to life without him.

He came up less and less as a topic for conversation between her and Christopher. She could tell he felt uncomfortable talking about him, and she had nothing to say, really, other than what she’d already said. Or that she’d written him a letter. No, it was as if his role in their timeline had frozen, and life was just going on, no one even caring that they were being left in the dark.

Or, if they weren’t left in the dark, no one caring they were going on without him.

Matthew was being his usual self. They’d just submitted their draft assignments for English, and to no one’s surprise, his had come back with a perfect 100%, nothing to improve. He’d just smirked when the teacher said that, and gone back to his desk. He was back to playing handball at lunch with the boys, all fashionably untucked shirts and loose ties.

And Lucie seemed to have gotten bolder too, more in the spotlight and out of the shadow that was her brother. She’d gotten the lead role in the school play, along with Matthew, and both of them had already been up on assembly giving the school a sneak-peak of some of their scenes.

Today on assembly, apparently they were going to hear Catherine Townsend playing her violin.

Cordelia rolled her eyes when she heard it, and fought the urge to roll them again now, at Catherine, all dressed up for this meager assembly performance. Bored, she looked around the room absently, and caught the eye of Matthew Fairchild.

This had happened a few times lately. She’d look around, still in a habit of looking for James, and she’d catch him, looking at her. He usually looked away.

She tried to think nothing of it: maybe this was just him with his guard down, maybe the mask did slip a little and he was looking for someone who understood the truth about James. Maybe he was actually looking at Christopher not her, and didn’t want to accidentally give her the wrong impression, and so she shouldn’t assume.

But this time he didn’t look away.

She made a face at him, as if to say ‘look how hard she’s trying, isn’t it ridiculous’.

He made an even weirder face back, agreeing with her in the same ridiculous way he did anything. She liked that about Matthew: even though Catherine was supposedly his friend based on the circles they hung out in, he’d always been somewhat of a free thinker. He knew people judged him for that, and he judged them right back, and more often than not, it meant agreeing with Cordelia when she thought something the other girls were doing was ridiculous.

Then Catherine started to play, and all thoughts disappeared from Cordelia’s head. Shit. She was good. And Cordelia still wouldn’t say she liked or agreed with the other girl on most things, but she could see why she’d kept that hidden. Everyone would be on her back after this. And maybe she liked it, but it had always been something Cordelia had hated watching happen to James.

“As ridiculous as you thought it’d be?” Matthew asked, appearing between her and Christopher as they walked towards their lockers to get their lunch.

“I thought she was quite good, actually,” Christopher said.

“She was fantastic! I’m not denying that,” Matthew said. “Just—it seemed a little bit excessive for the school assembly. Don’t you think so, Cordelia?”

Cordelia shrugged. He was right. “Catherine’s always liked the attention,” she said. “I’m surprised she hasn’t done something like this earlier.”

When James was here, she added in her head. Matthew would understand. The silent plea of couldn’t she have taken some of the spotlight away from him?

Would it even have helped, or was that just her wishful thinking?

“I suppose she was scared,” Matthew said. “Not because she’s not good at it—but I think she wanted to wait until she could guarantee she was the best.”

And if that didn’t sound ominous, Cordelia didn’t know what did.

Chapter Text

Can't seem to shake this feeling, but I must be strong

Underwater but I'm breathing, I go on

- tina arena, not still in love with you

Maybe this would become their new normal, Cordelia thought, as Matthew sat down with her and Christopher, like he did from time to time, slotting into their routine like some sort of animal they had part-time custody of. He’d be off again in ten minutes, but he made a point to hang out with them as part of his usual rounds, if nothing else, she imagined, to take some of the pressure of having to act like he wasn’t missing James off himself.

He did the same to Grace and Lucie, she knew, showing up at their lockers between classes, walking them home sometimes after school. This was just one of the odd things Matthew did, and for some reason, he’d chosen her and Christopher for it as well.

She’d heard he’d been in Mardi Gras that year, part of one of the parades now that he was 18, though whether he was half-naked and wearing drag or in leather, the story varied.

Anna Lightwood had seen him there, so she believed that, but the way that the Shire worked was people would hear something out of the ordinary or a little risque someone did, and push it way out of proportion. Change the story. Matthew, ever the entertainer, responded to bullying by simply outdoing the bullies at that. Making his own stories more scandalous. Maybe that was why she didn’t know the truth.

Still, it seemed like a successful strategy where behind the whispers from the more conservative people in their grade, was an undying sense of respect. Everyone liked Matthew, or at least pretended to. He and James ruled the school. And without James, Matthew still did, alone.

And yet, Cordelia’s nagging intuition was telling her, that though the school loved James, it was with that love that they destroyed him. Broke him down like mining opal-rich soil for his ‘potential’ and then moulded him into something he was never meant to be. Never had the strength to sustain.

Before she met James, Cordelia thought the whole idea of being ‘starving’ on an emotional level before meeting someone and suddenly realising they fixed a problem you didn’t even know you were experiencing was a fable. Some bullshit sold by Britney Spears and Tina Arena to write songs about.

And then she met James. And they were just friends, really, that’s all it ever was, innocent hangouts at lunch, playing sport together in PE. But what he was, was someone she always felt so safe around. And, when you’re someone like Cordelia, feeling safe was dangerous. It meant letting your guard down, something a brown girl at a school in the Shire with a family like hers could never afford to do. And so she could never let herself feel those emotions.

Never let herself care for him, and now it was too late.

Now all that she had left of him was Matthew, flitting around and sitting with her and Christopher like back in those days, when James (and Thomas) were there too.

Really, Cordelia had him to thank for everything good in her life. For meeting Christopher, her only true friend who’d stayed by her side through it all. For the way that she even, somehow, got along well now with her brother—though she supposed that for that, she rather had Thomas Lightwood to thank.

And then there was Matthew. The only one who in her fantasies, could guess what was inside her head. She wanted to hold him at a distance, secret glances across the room, innocent banter when they hung out, keep lying to Christopher, lying to everyone, living inside her head. And she wanted to collapse into his arms, tell him everything, tell him no one understood what it was like like each other, beg him to make things right and bring James back and maybe they could fix him.

When he glanced at her across the room in Maths or Geography she lived inside either of those fantasies, where she was cool and suave and mysterious but also not afraid to admit how she felt.

The real Cordelia was none of those things.

She’d tried to get over James, a lot of times, actually, over the years.

James, who showed interest in her in hindsight, in shy, subtle ways as if something was holding him back. Back then, none of it was enough to break through Cordelia’s thick wall of self-deprecation, of the belief that no one could love her it’d take something really obvious to disprove.

For whatever reason James never was that obvious, just subtle glances and saving her a seat on the bus. And she realised now, belatedly, that if he wasn’t okay no matter whether he returned her feelings, she’d do anything for him. She cared about him more than she cared about herself, and her ego.

And yet, similarly and also opposingly, she realised that if he was anything like her father, it didn’t matter how much she liked him and how much she cared about him and how he treated her, she was going to run in the other direction. She was going to force herself to get over him. It’d never worked before, but that was all the more reason to stay away from him. She was helpless.

And she’d maintain her own strength, her own agency against her emotions in whatever way she needed, to prevent herself becoming like her mother, in love with a man who could never love her back because his only real love was the bottle.

She roamed the strip of mall with Christopher after school, hating the way she judged the other girls for their tiny low-rise jeans over their nonexistent asses and showing off their flat stomachs. She listened to him vent about chemistry, loving how passionate he was and how it served as a distraction for her. She brought him to her house, a taboo but something even her parents could never stop her from, and got him to use his knowledge of chemistry to get an assortment of stains out of the past summer’s clothes. Wine, lipstick, blood, hair dye—all of it was gone with the encyclopedic chemistry knowledge of Christopher Lightwood and whatever he’d bought from the shops with his fake ID ‘for fun’.

And today was the same as any other day, except for, today they also had Matthew Fairchild.

He was a terrible follower, always ducking into obscure shops none of them could afford (okay, maybe he could, but it wasn’t like he was actually going to buy anything) and getting upset when the two of them refused to wait for him to try on hats, and instead just kept walking. He was clearly bored; Cordelia didn’t know why he was even there.

Maybe it was the least boring option he had now—that thought broke Cordelia’s heart a little.

She didn’t know if it was because of their mutual care for James or the fact that he’d always been there, even when he was annoying her in all of her classes in Year 8, but she’d come to care about him too.

He got along with Christopher quite well, surprisingly so for people who operated in completely opposite social circles, if the stereotypes were to be believed.

The same stereotypes that for years, had tormented Cordelia, told her she wasn’t worthy of someone like James.

She wondered what it would be like if James were there, if their social group hadn’t split in half (with Thomas in the middle, like some sort of mediator, before he, being a year older, finished school) all those years ago. It felt like they were walking around, the three of them, with a hole right in the middle.

They talked about anything and everything: movies, pop culture, politics. Matthew was old enough to vote now, and the federal election was coming up. He’d registered with the Greens. Cordelia didn’t know you could even do that.

Christopher had gone into some science shop now, leaving the two together outside, alone. Cordelia fiddled with the earphones connected to her mp3 player. Matthew braided the tassles of his 80s-looking cowboy hat.

Christopher went to the front counter to pay, smiling in their direction. She knew Matthew wouldn’t think she was talking about him.

“He’s not coming back, is he?” Cordelia asked.

Matthew just looked at her with a sad smile, and said nothing. Matthew never said nothing.

Lucie Herondale was someone Cordelia had kept a curious eye on for years.

James’ younger sister by fifteen months, she was a year and six weeks younger than Cordelia: really not much in the scheme of things. In her fantasies where she was James’ girlfriend, going to his house all the time, the two stuck up a sort of friendship. Something in Cordelia had always longed for a girl best friend. Christopher was the best friend she could ever have, but still, she longed for what the main characters had in movies.

Lucie had, as a result, become a sort of concept in her mind, an aspiration even more so than James himself.

Lucie was confident, and proudly weird. Lucie was best friends with Grace Blackthorn, and they shared secrets and stolen drinks, and wrote graffiti in bathroom stalls together. Lucie wore all the latest fashions, and looked great in them, but she ripped her own jeans and she wrote poetry on blank oversized t-shirts and wore them to school.

Lucie, undoubtedly, knew what was going on with her own brother. Even if she hadn’t been told, she was the one person she knew who was more curious than Cordelia herself, and she was smart, too—she would’ve found out.

Cordelia had a distinct memory one day, when the five of them (and Alastair, Cordelia had no idea why he was there at the time but now it made perfect sense) were at James’ house and Lucie had declared that Cordelia looked like a beautiful princess (‘among all of those ugly boys’) and because Lucie was going to be a writer, she would write about her.

Cordelia wasn’t sure if she ever did, or whether she even wanted to know the answer.

“Daisy” was what Lucie used to call her, and Cordelia had no idea whether she still would now.

“Oh my God, Daisy!” someone said as Cordelia was walking through the quadrangle, not watching where she was going, and something almost barrelled into her from the side.

That someone was Lucie: taller than when Cordelia had last been this close to her, but still tiny. The way her heart raced in anticipation, Cordelia wondered, when you had a crush on someone, did you normally develop a bit of a weird secondary crush on their whole family? Or was it just that proximity to Lucie was just one step closer to knowing something, anything, about James?

“Lucie, hi!” Cordelia managed to stammer out.

“Daisy, are you okay?” Lucie asked. “You seem a bit out of it today, do you need anything?”

Lucie was sweet when she was being nice to you: she made you feel like you were the centre of the world, but she was also someone who was quick to go from being your best friend to your face to ignoring you.

Cordelia nodded. “Just tired,” she said.

Lucie looked at her like she knew something. She narrowed her eyes for a moment, then pulled Cordelia into a—stiff and unexpected—hug.

“If you want to give anything to James, or pass on any message or a little encouragement,” she whispered, mostly into Cordelia’s shirt, “just let me know.”

Then she let go and left Cordelia, shellshocked, while she hurried off to wherever she was going.

“He’s not dead,” Matthew said to her when he found her, letting down the mask for once in her life, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. She didn’t want to admit that he was right.

“Yeah, Lucie just told me she’d pass on a letter to him for me or something?” Cordelia said, asking it like it was a question, because what the fuck? “Am I that obviously pining for James?”

And that was it. She’d never actually said any of that out loud. She couldn’t really believe her own voice to her own ears.

“Are you?” Matthew asked, amused.

“I don’t think I am at the moment,” Cordelia said, and it came out a little more flirty than she intended.

“Just another strange thing Lucie does then,” Matthew said, grinning thoughtfully. “You’ve got the seal of approval then, she likes you.”

“What do you mean, Lucie’s always liked me,” Cordelia said, faking a confidence, a lightness. Was she actually going to send something to James? Who knew. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“Yeah, you’re right, why wouldn’t she? Everyone should like you, Daisy.”

And then things became easier between them after that. They hung out, reminiscing about James sometimes, but also talking about Mardi Gras, or Matthew’s baby sisters, or whatever their older brothers were doing now. Sometimes Christopher was there, sometimes he wasn’t, but either way, it was natural.

They didn’t discuss exactly where James was, which, Cordelia was glad for because she still felt protective of his image, still didn’t want to be overheard saying anything that someone might take out of context.

It was like he was a fantasy, a secret shared between them.

Christopher, surprisingly, asked fellow scientist Grace Blackthorn to formal and by this point, everyone was sure Matthew would ask Lucie.

But one day Cordelia arrived at school to flowers in her locker, and a little note that said ‘James isn’t here to do this, so I am, come to formal with me Daisy <3’

Hidden in the bouquet underneath the sunflowers were dozens of little daisies.

And Cordelia was torn. It had been her dream to go to formal with James, and now, in their senior year realising she had one less year of him, one less year of being in his orbit and pretending she wasn’t—now she had it, actual interaction and an invitation from Matthew.

She’d say yes of course—what else could she do? But she had to reach out to James. Take up Lucie’s offer. She trusted Matthew wouldn’t do anything to betray him—what betrayal was there, when they weren’t anything anyway? Why couldn’t she stop overthinking it, and just go to formal with him? It’s not like she and James were that close anyway.

On the surface.

Fuck it.

Saying yes and basking in the spotlight was the easy task; Cordelia barely felt it in anticipation of what she was about to do next. Was she really? She sat in class with the letter in her zipper pocket all of the next day, debating. Anxious. Feeling like her left side was being weighed down by lead.

And that afternoon, she stayed on the bus a stop longer. She got off with Lucie, ran after her in the direction of her house. James’ house.

“Lucie!” she said, holding out the letter. Now or never.

“Oh Daisy! Did I forget something? Hey, I’ll take that.” Lucie snatched the letter like everything was her business, and smiled, sad and earnest and mature in a way Cordelia had never seen on Lucie Herondale.

“Thank you,” she said.

It was surreal, really, the story. Not her and James’—despite the nerves she felt for days, weeks of anticipating something, anything but the usual radio silence from Lucie, she never got anything. But a new source of gossip had hit the school, and particularly Lucie’s life—it turned out Grace Blackthorn had a brother. An adopted brother, apparently, though Cordelia still wasn’t sure which of them it was that was adopted.

It sounded fake, really, his story—he’d been a year older than Cordelia, two years older than Grace and Lucie, in his final year of high school last year when he was in a snowboarding accident—yes, snowboarding, even though there was no snow anywhere near Sydney—and had brain damage and been in a coma and spent almost a year trying to recover.

He’d only half finished his last year of high school at some fancy selective all-boys’ school in the city, and instead of getting some sort of medical adjustments and just graduating with his class when he still barely knew who he was, he was returning to school, now, at Cronulla High, almost a year later.

And, apparently, he was also dating Lucie.

It was obvious, really, that Lucie had much bigger things on her mind than whatever she was facilitating between Cordelia, a mere acquaintance, and her own brother.

But Matthew always had time for her. So they hung out, went to dances and parties while Christopher stayed late in the lab doing science things with Grace, and Lucie hung out with Jesse. Jesse was his name. He was nineteen, too old for a sixteen-year-old to be dating, really, but with everything Lucie must’ve been going through for the last few months, or longer at home, she did deserve to let loose and have fun with a hot older guy, Cordelia could admit.

And Cordelia could feel bitter about the lack of her love life—she’d spent so long basing so much of her worth around how James treated her, and now he wasn’t even here, she’d been vulnerable to him in a letter and he hadn’t even replied. She’d done her part, and she was exhausted, fed up. The ball was in his court, and assuming he was in a right enough headspace to make the decision, he’d either get back to her, or she’d forget about him.

At least, that’s what she told herself. It was easy with Matthew. Had James ever liked her romantically? She wasn’t sure.

She and Matthew went to the Easter show when school broke up at the end of term. They kissed on top of the Ferris wheel. It felt natural. It felt real, in comparison to all the pining she’d done, the imagined futures of dating James in her head when nothing like that ever eventuated in real life. Fantasy, all of it. He’d had enough time now to read and reply to her letter. He obviously didn’t care; she needed to let him go.

It was only when she got home, pulled off her circus-stiped tights and took off her makeup, that she looked in the mirror and thought, what the hell is my life?

Was she even over James at all, or was she using Matthew to fuel some sort of imagination about getting closer to him?

Chapter Text

Some things we don't discuss,

They hurt too much, they gather dust.

Just know this broom and brush

Won't sweep away the truth of us.

Hey now, hey now, hey now

I know who you really are

Nobody could steal your spark

And when you're ready to leave, when you're ready to leave I'll be there.

I know who you really are

I know you've got a lion's heart

And when you're ready to leave, when you're ready to leave I'll be there.

- tina arena, when you're ready

It was by accident, really, that Cordelia discovered Matthew had been drinking all of the time he was with her.

She thought he was just an Athletic Guy who really liked to be well hydrated.

He chewed gum, the kind that covered up every scent, covered up the taste of alcohol even when they kissed.

Shit, he’d even been driving. On his green P’s now, Matthew had a fancy sports car, and many a time he’d picked her up in it to go somewhere and declined every drink he was offered wherever they went: he was on his P’s, he said, he couldn’t even have a single drop. He said the bottle of ‘water’ he was carrying with him was enough.

He was a fucking liar. What if they’d been pulled over by the cops? Cordelia would’ve been stranded; she couldn’t drive his car home.

Or worse, what if they’d gotten into an accident?

She tried not to think about it. Of her dad, not allowed to drive, not really useful in any way, really, and all the things Cordelia had to do for herself because he wasn’t there and her mum was too busy looking after him to be a parent. Of all the times they’d feared for him, because he was drinking and drove anyway, of the way they sighed in relief at the good news and found some good even in the bad—at least he wasn’t dead, no one was dead or permanently disabled.

Cordelia had gone to fetch Matthew his waterbottle from on top of the lockers, that he was weirdly stressed about having left behind (“It’s just water, you’re not gonna shrivel up and die if you don’t drink water for a few hours” “yes I will”—his puppy dog eyes really were quite convincing) and, lost in her own head, she’d tripped over a banana peel—yes a banana, don’t laugh at her—some idiot kid had left behind and dropped it.

The lid had popped open and what had come out was not water, was not electrolytes or Red Bull or some other strange but perfectly legal drink high schoolers brought around to get them through their day.

No, it was a smell that was all too familiar to her, if not for the parties she’d been to, at home from an age she wished she didn’t have to admit.

Matthew was over 18, sure, but they still weren’t allowed alcohol at school. Cordelia knew he drank, at parties and on the weekends, heck, most of them did, but it was something completely different to carry alcohol around all day at school and then lie about it.

No wonder James was—whatever he was. Wherever.

She didn’t go back to class. Didn’t bring him his waterbottle. She rinsed it out, filled it with water, actual water from the bubbler, and put it right back on top of his locker where she found it.

Then she went to the nurse’s office, told them she was sick, and asked to go home. Word would spread. Someone would let Christopher know so he wouldn’t wait for her. And Matthew. Someone would assume the kid that dropped the banana peel had also spilled vodka all over the floor, and they’d see justice for littering. No one had seen her, she knew the school well enough for that. She sat at the bus stop for the rest of the afternoon, waiting until it was safe to go into her house and pretend she’d been at school all day.

The usual bus she caught home was coming around the corner into her view, and soon, she’d have to get up and start walking home. Without her on it, it’d fly past her stop, and it did.

Wait.

The bus came to a sudden stop just past where it usually did, still half in the lane and half in the bus stop. It opened the door and Lucie stepped out.

“There you are,” Lucie said, eyeing her. “Matthew kept saying you ‘rinsed out his unique spring water and replaced it with tap water’ and I know him, I’ve seen the idiot drink from a toilet before when he was drunk. He’s a snob, but not that much of a water snob. Daisy, you’re not actually sick are you? You’re just pretending, or you’re upset. Come with me.”

And then she was being dragged by the hand, all the way to James’ house, somewhere she hadn’t been in years.

“Matthew drank from a toilet?” was all she asked. It was absurd and in the grand scheme of things she didn’t care, it was better than being an alcoholic which now that she put the signs together he definitely was—but gross, she’d kissed a guy who’d drunk from the toilet.

“From the top of it, I think, according to Jamie, I don’t know.” Lucie sighed. “Apparently that part’s clean. I don’t know, I don’t care, neither do you. Your family loves James, right? We can kidnap you for a bit?”

“Yes—but—” she tried to protest. She didn’t know how. “Is Matthew mad at me?” she settled on asking.

“He’s ashamed, I think,” Lucie said. “Kicking up a fuss about nothing. You’ll make up. Maybe not kiss, given that he drank from a toilet, I wouldn’t recommend that.”

It didn’t matter—Cordelia was sure she’d never be kissing Matthew again.

“How come he’s—here—and James isn’t?” she asked, puffing, out of breath from the half-jog to the Herondales’ place a few stops further down the line, and the absurdity of it all that was making her nervous system go haywire.

“Listen, Matthew’s done some fucked up things, and you probably know that,” Lucie said. “But he’s smart, and James is an idiot. You’ll see.”

All Cordelia could do was wait. Try to smooth out her school uniform, wipe up the sweat so it didn’t look like she’d been dragged over a kilometre against her will just to surprise the Herondales on their front porch.

“Lucie, what took you so long?” Cordelia hadn’t heard Tessa’s voice for years. Hadn’t felt the way she’d always invited her into her home, made sure she felt comfortable, given her a concept of the warmth of family that she’d never felt otherwise, because home always felt off—and as she later found out, it was built on a lie.

A lie that she’d fallen for, again, with Matthew.

“Come on Lulu, get in the car.” That was Will. Cordelia was dragged through a car door as Lucie slid in, her brain deciding to unhelpfully remind her she was probably sitting in what had been James’ seat, and send shivers up her spine.

“I brought Daisy,” Lucie said, and all of a sudden Will and Tessa’s demeanour both shifted from the casual frustration of parents whose daughter ‘always makes them late’ (that was something Cordelia had definitely heard James talking about, on multiple occasions) to the excitement that seemed to take over them every time a guest was in their house (or car), and a Carstairs at that.

It was odd, being kidnapped (if you could even call it that, when she was almost 18) by the people she once hoped would be her parents-in-law.

It was odder still, that they were driving to the supposed rehab facility James was at, going through tunnels she didn’t even know existed—it really did feel like some sort of alternate reality.

Visiting hours with his family had become a normal part of James’ routine. On Monday afternoons, all three of them would come, sometimes with Uncle Jem, and these days, sometimes with Jesse.

He’d learned that he didn’t have to fear it, the predictability, the grief that they still got to live their lives and he didn’t.

It was normal, the way that they all stepped into the room, but then he saw it, a flash of red hair and walking in behind them, was Cordelia.

And James’ body just froze. His thoughts were blank, he couldn’t breathe, and then he was breaking down right there in front of them with Cordelia watching, the first she’d seen of him in years.

Someone was there with him, taking him back to his room. He sighed in relief, coming back to himself a little when he realised it was Catarina. One of the nicer nurses, he felt like she somehow understood him.

“Shh, sweetie, do you wanna talk about it?” she said.

“There’s too much to talk about,” James said. And that was the truth, the annoying one too, is that everything was in his head but he couldn’t figure out how to let it out, how to talk about it, despite all the time that he had. It felt like his brain was still processing, drawing up blanks where everything he knew about his own life should be.

He felt like a child again, being comforted by his dad when he was scared. Except, now, he didn’t want to see his parents. Not like this. Definitely not. He could maybe see Lucie, though.

He tried to communicate that, and probably did awfully (what had happened to him, he used to be a writer and a musician?) but whether it was seconds or hours later, he didn’t know, but they brought Lucie in.

She held him in her lap as he cried, saying unintelligible things even to his own brain. Snot bubbled around his feeding tube. He really was disgusting.

He didn’t know how many more ‘I don’t wanna be here’s and ‘I don’t want her to see me like this’s he could babble out, he could put Lucie through. She’d been trying to help, clearly, he’d been so lonely here, missing his old life, missing what could’ve been. He’d been daydreaming, and Lucie saw through him too well. She always did. It was odd, their relationship, and James wondered when she stopped being his little sister, and started just being his sister. He wanted to be the older brother for her. He wanted so many things. But he couldn’t.

Cordelia sat in some sort of waiting room with Will and Tessa, after Lucie left with the blue-haired nurse.

She was so, so confused. But it’s not like her dad ever agreed to go to rehab anyway. She wasn’t sure what it was like.

But the James in front of her seemed like a shadow of the James she knew, and yet, seeing him vulnerable like that even for a moment, seemed to solidify and validate everything her intuition had been telling her.

It was like deja vu, even though she was sure she’d never seen him anything like this. She’d never even seen him properly drunk, though she had seen him drinking. He was always the responsible one, always looking after Matthew who liked to get plastered.

Will and Tessa asked her polite questions about herself, about school, about her brother.

“Yes, Alastair’s still dating Thomas, yes, Christopher’s cousin who’s super tall now.”

She wished she had more politeness to give them. More of her usual self. The truth was, she was flunking most of her classes. She didn’t know how she’d make it into university next year. But at least they were kind about Alastair. Many people’s parents were homophobic.

She thought they’d leave her eventually, to go and see James, but they never did. She couldn’t imagine how the fact that they felt like they couldn’t do that was impacting their family. The Herondales had always been close.

And then Lucie came back, smiling through tear-stained cheeks, saying it’s okay, James was fine now, and Will and Tessa thanking her, thanking Cordelia (though she wasn’t sure what for) and she was sure the odd image would stick in her brain forever, along with James, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed and breaking down in front of them.

In the back of the car, Lucie begged her to stay the night. To call her parents and tell them where she was and that Lucie needed her, and so she did.

“You’ve always wanted a girl friend like Lucie,” Sona said, knowingly, and Cordelia just felt more and more dread. Decades of masking, and now everyone could see through her. She wondered if that was how James felt.

James stayed awake, unable to get the image of her out of his head. Cordelia. She was prettier than he remembered, but it was hard to keep his memories from muddling themselves out of sheer boredom with the smallness of his world and the repetitiveness of his routine. He thought, at first, after he spent so long trying to fight it, this forced rest was helping him recover, helping him get out of the cycle of the grind and all the coping mechanisms he’d built up for it. And then he’d slept for days, it seemed, not eating and struggling to get out of bed, thoughts spiralling in his head but being able to catch none of them, express none of them. He barely remembered Lucie and Grace and Matthew coming in on the latter’s birthday, dressed up in their party clothes and fussing about angles and backgrounds with the Polariod camera, trying to make it look like he was at the party.

Later he’d been told that was the depression, the comedown after the energetic high (not euphoric, not happy, he’d never felt happy) he’d experienced, and he was being medicated for it now, and he got annoyed every time someone came in to make sure he took them but he was in such a daze, there was no way he could’ve remembered for himself.

It seemed like one day he was studying and surfing every day over the summer, and the next, this.

It was also possible that he was so isolated he’d get excited over the first girl he saw who wasn’t in here with him, but that was Grace, and no, despite whatever history they had, no he hadn’t.

He and Cordelia had a history of their own, in a way.

His thoughts were spiralling, narrowing in on the one thing as they often did, when there was no one (usually Matthew, though recently Catarina had been able to) to pull him out of it and back into reality.

Maybe he would play the sheet music his parents had brought. Try and do something normal, make the effort to show he was trying to get better.

But his hands weren’t his own, and the notes just swam on the page. How could he even try?

Cordelia sat down in Lucie’s bed, in a borrowed nightie, heck, even the pad she was wearing was theirs. She tried not to dwell on the fact that everything that family owned was way too small for her. A sleepover with Lucie. This was a dream come true, though the circumstances were all wrong.

Lucie cuddled into her side, her tears wetting Cordelia’s chest. This was definitely something she never in her wildest dreams, thought she would have a chance to see.

She rubbed Lucie’s back, even though Lucie was inconsolable, and though she was so, so curious, she knew when not to ask questions.

In some ways, part of Cordelia felt vindicated—like this was a reality she saw coming, as grim as it was, and spent her whole life preparing for.

It was like she knew she was put here to do something good for James, and by extension, all of the Herondales.

“He had a manic episode,” Lucie said between sobs, “found a gun and shot a chandelier. We almost blamed Matthew, we were so confused, but at the end of the day we’re just lucky we got him help instead of being arrested, and that the venue was willing to keep it under wraps.”

No wonder Cordelia hadn’t heard of it then. Gossip spread quickly in the Shire—whatever venue it was, then, they’d been lucky, really lucky they didn’t put it all over the papers.

Cronulla, Kurnell, heck even Sutherland’s golden boy, caught shooting chandeliers in a country with some of the world’s strictest gun laws.

Cordelia could imagine how that story would spread.

Lucie was shaking now, as if the story just overwhelmed her that much. “He hasn’t been home since the first week of January. I never knew how much I’d miss him.” Her sobs got louder, and she punched at a pink, frilled pillow. A remnant of her childhood, too innocent for the Lucie Cordelia knew now.

“I thought maybe bringing you would make him feel better,” Lucie sobbed. “I thought—” Cordelia had no time to try and figure out what Lucie’s thought process behind that.

“He’s so sick,” she said. “I just wanted to help him. All I’ve ever wanted to do is help him. That’s all a little sister wants. You get that, don’t you?” She just sobbed even harder. “I don’t know what to be without Jamie. He has an eating disorder, did you know that? And a derealisation disorder, makes him forget who he is. He’s never gonna remember to eat on his own while he has it. If he doesn’t do something to get better, he’s gonna die.”

And she was hysterical, and Cordelia thought back to all the years of living at the edges—and now, now that she was here, she had no idea how to comfort her.

So, on the oddest night of her life, she just held a distraught Lucie until she fell asleep.

And then the phone rang, right then at a quarter past midnight, and Cordelia felt her heart stop. Was it her family? Did something happen?

Over the sound of Lucie’s soft snores were whispers. Will was on the phone, Cordelia couldn’t make head or tail of what he was saying.

“What’s going on, honey?” Tessa whispered, more of a hiss, making the soft sound travel further.

“Matthew’s in hospital with alcohol poisoning.”

Cordelia was so, so confused.

Will and Tessa had left, after discussing back and forth whether to wake Lucie, they’d heard her breakdown before, apparently, and decided to let her sleep.

Cordelia assumed Lucie was the kind of person who overheard everything when she was awake and always made it known when she did, so they could pretty well be sure that she was asleep.

She wondered if that meant he was going to go to rehab with James.

Was James even in rehab? She didn’t know. She had made assumptions, and if earlier in the day had told her anything, it was that the assumptions she made weren’t necessarily right.

What did Cordelia even do? Everything was going to shit—she’d fallen out with Matthew and now he was sick, James was possibly dying and Lucie was drowning in worry, no doubt his parents were too.

It was funny how she was the most insecure person until her longing to be a hero kicked in, then she didn’t care how people treated her or whether they reciprocated—she would do anything she could to save the ones that she loved.

Reaching carefully over the side of the bed to her backpack so as to not wake Lucie, Cordelia pulled out a notebook and a pen and wrote another letter to James.

Dear James,

I don’t know what to say here, but sorry if me coming scared you. It wasn’t my choice, Lucie kind of kidnapped me, and really both she and I should have let you know beforehand, let you have a little more agency about who you let in.

I feel like it’s just empty words if I apologise or send my condolences for how things are. I’m sorry for offending Matthew. You knew, didn’t you? You must’ve been so worried, and I wonder if it’s a bit of karma for you now, the way that all of us are worried for you.

And it’s not your fault. I hope you know that. I bet you have well-meaning people around you telling you, nagging you, to just magically fix everything as if that’s how it works. Of course it’s not. You situations aren’t comparable, I don’t think, but I’ve watched my father try to get better and then fail, again and again.

And yet, you, James, have never been one to fail anything.

I know I sound like our teachers here, the dumbasses who like to push and push and look at you different if you can take it, be the person they want, or when you can’t they’ll push you anyway, until they know the reason why and then they’ll look at you like you’re some poor, sad lost cause. I know it and I know it’s the worst feeling.

But the thing is, all those skills we learned about studying and self-discipline, and for you, everything you learned from piano and surfing, all of it’s still there, I know it. I’ve watched you from the sidelines for years, and you’ve always been brilliant. And I know some of that can make you feel like nothing is work at all—but a lot of it comes down to a grit and determination that can be applied to other things. Maybe with the pressure dialled down, maybe with full permission to be yourself whoever that is. But I can say one thing, and that’s that whoever that is, is someone I desperately, desperately want to meet. I hope I get the chance to. I hope you know that it’s not, it’s never too late.

I feel like I have to say here, even if it’s so extremely obvious to me that I could convince myself you know me enough to already know, but I don’t see you any differently after today. I appreciate being able to be let in (by your family) to see you in a vulnerable state, and I grieve so much that it wasn’t able to happen with your consent. Because you deserve to be seen as you want to be seen, and you deserve to be seen and loved for who you really are.

I don’t know if we’ve ever really discussed this but you also deserve to be free from perceptions of you that aren’t who you really are, or force you into a role (academic, surfer, whatever) that isn’t something you want to be (or can sustain), or maybe it is for a time but things change or you change your mind. One thing I’m sure of is that everything you are, is always enough.

The James I know is brave, and nothing you’re going through can change that. Has a stubbornness that can do so much good, that deserves to be set free to fight for justice, and I hope that if it’s helping to hurt you, you’re able to listen to it, redirect it.

At the end of the day I don’t know if any of these things I’m saying help. I’m more saying them to get them off my chest, because at the end of the day I really do care about you, not the James whose popularity and the love you receive is conditional on anything you do. The James I saw longing to be set free in a time where everything good we do just piles on more pressure, where sometimes people who want the best for you also exploit you for the thrill of watching you ‘succeed’. You deserve full consent with no strings in that, to be able to opt in and opt out and still always remember you’re just as worthy. Or to burn it to the ground if you want to. Christopher has matches, we can definitely make that happen.

I hope that if there’s nothing else you can do right now, you are able to take steps, no matter how small, to feeling free. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do, but give the word and I’ll do something, anything. Fight your demons or change the world or leave you the fuck alone, anything. Make sure people treat you right and no one has the chance to, even accidentally, put out that flame.

I’ll regret it forever if I don’t take this chance to tell you: you’re incandescent. Something about you, I feel it in my soul and my intuition that’s telling me, that maybe as a world we don’t deserve James Herondale and we sure have abused the privilege of having you around, but when you’re ready, whether it’s when things get better or when you just want a change, things can change. We’re on the precipice. The life we’ve lived up until now—it isn’t forever. There’s a life that’s kind to you, somewhere out there, and it’s within our power to create that. Your power. With whoever you choose, whoever you trust to be by your side. You’re strong enough for this. So is Matthew. You also don’t have to always be strong. That’s part of your strength, I think.

Anyway I’ve rambled on enough about things that don’t make sense so ignore anything that’s weird or uncomfortable, I’ll say sorry in advance. Let me know, and I won’t do it again. Heck, just let me know, and I’m here. Lucie’s asleep beside me. She worries, but it’s not your job to carry that.

Jamie, no matter what anyone says, you can be anything. You also don’t have to be anything you don’t want to, or don’t want to make whatever sacrifices it takes to attempt to be. Things will get better. You’ll get to feel freer. We’ve got time, to discover what that means, to build you up away from whatever is hurting you.

I’ll be here whenever you’re ready to talk again. Please don’t feel pressured, take your time.

Sending strength and that Persian tea you always loved with scones.

Cordelia

Chapter Text

Can't cover up your scars,

But I'll do everything to fix your heart.

So don't fight it,

What's left to lose?

- tina arena, wouldn't be love if it didn't

Matthew woke up to the sound of conversations and movement.

“Jamie?” he heard himself say. “Jamie, is that you?”

“Sweetie, it’s me. We can go and see him once you’re feeling better, would you like that?” That was his mother, speaking to him like he was a child, like she hadn’t spoken to him like in years.

He blinked his eyes open and immediately regretted it.

“Can you turn the lights off, Mama?” he asked. It was all coming back to him. Cordelia never coming back to class, having to drink the disgusting tap water, cravings he could do nothing about, wanting to forget everything.

He wanted to forget, especially now. The shame of it all was far too much for Matthew.

Now Cordelia knew, his parents probably knew, soon enough they’d find that his problems were the one thing that tipped Jamie over the edge.

There would be talk about rehab, maybe. Or just limiting his access to alcohol, to drinking and parties while also having to do school and everything else, which sounded worse. He wasn’t sure, except about one thing he definitely knew: that he wasn’t ready to face any of it.

Cordelia woke up, groggy with her open notebook lying on the floor, to Lucie’s blaring alarm.

The unfamiliarity of it hit her gradually and then all at once. For this to be the first night she stayed at the Herondales—with James not even there, yes, but so, so much had gone wrong.

Matthew.

Lucie.

James.

She wriggled out into the cold bedroom and picked up her notebook, tore the page she wrote on out and left it on Lucie’s desk. Along with a tea bag from the ‘emergency stash’ her mum packed for her, because she was sappy.

She didn’t reread it, or she’d lose the nerve, chicken out and go back to what was safe and comfortable, do nothing for James and beat herself up for it forever. Sometimes life was about taking risks.

So she showered and put on her school uniform from yesterday, trying not to think. She called her mum from the house phone, then took the bus to school with Lucie, trying not to think.

The Herondales had reassured both girls that Matthew was okay, being looked after now, and they could visit him after school. Not that Cordelia was going to go.

She soldiered on through her classes, feeling oddly empty now that Matthew wasn’t there, to liven up the room.

Christopher told everyone he’d fallen ill with a gastro. Lucie made out with Jesse in the hallway like nothing was wrong, but Cordelia could see the desperation with which she clung to him. The school day just went on with the ghosts of James and Matthew in the air, and Cordelia couldn’t stand it.

She hugged her mum tightly when she got home, and avoided all of her questions.

It became a bit of a routine for her. The only time she could be vulnerable, was when she wrote letters to James.

Matthew came back to school, high on Valium he was probably mixing with Adderall. Cordelia wondered how long he could sustain that: if school and its structure had finally broken him, so close to the finish line too.

Lucie cornered her in the hallway and told her, cryptically, that she’d passed on ‘what you left behind’ and was grateful. She wrote another letter to James, but didn’t give it to Lucie.

A week and a half later, she found out that James had written to her.

It was like her whole system went haywire when Lucie passed her the letter, as if she was holding something holy, the words that could vindicate or damn her, that she was both desperate to and dreading to open up.

At least James was well enough to write, she thought, tried to convince herself that either way it was a good sign. But a decent part of her was convinced that he’d written to say he wanted to hear nothing from her.

Dear Daisy,

I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you after your first letter. It was really sweet, honestly, I was so stuck in my head that I didn’t really think that anyone cared.

Thank you for being in my corner, for understanding me better than nearly anyone. They all try to be helpful, it’s overwhelming and annoying, and I can’t stand it.

Matthew’s a handful. Please don’t feel like you have to be the only one to take care of him. He and I are the same, in a lot of ways. Broken in ways ordinary people aren’t equipped to fix.

I can’t shake the dread or the feeling of damnation from my bones. My mind has betrayed me, in a way that anything that has pushed to the brink would. I should be kinder to myself. I should be kinder to you.

I don’t know when things will get better, but I’m starting to stop myself from thinking ‘if’.

I think people see what they want to see of you, and it’s very superficial, very boxed into categories, and they can’t understand how it’s possible to go from one category to another.

Some call it a tragedy, but maybe it’s just being human. I always felt like if I opened up, you would understand. Maybe that’s why I was so scared to. Because it’s easy to live in the fantasy where you let no one down.

But it’s really only the people who want me without any of the achievements they want from me that I should care about letting down. And I’m trying to survive. I’ll be honest, it’s really hard. Sometimes I lose sight of it.

I can’t help but think that the fact that you understand is horrible. Not for me, for me it’s a Godsend, but for you, you deserve help before you break down. Maybe when I’m out, when I’m able to function in whatever way becomes my new normal, I’ll be able to help you facilitate that.

Thank you for believing in me.

With love (because we don’t have enough of it expressed freely these days),

Jamie

Lucie, the nosy bastard she knew she was, couldn’t help but take a peep at the letter.

She told herself it was out of concern, not wanting Cordelia to see anything traumatising. She’d seen enough of that in recent months—years, actually, if she really thought about it—herself.

She didn’t know what she was expecting, but it’d been a while since she’d seen her brother so earnest. A long while. Really, Lucie should’ve known that something was wrong far, far sooner than she did. Than anyone did. James was awfully secretive. She didn’t know what it was between him and Cordelia, but when she brought her along, it was worth a shot. What other things did she have left to do?

The biggest comfort through all this was her boyfriend: the insights he had in recovering from his traumatic brain injury, the way when she went to the doctors with him every visit was full of hope and evidence he was actually recovering. Grace’s family, fucked up as they were, should be grateful. Deserved it after how much they worried about him last year—heck, she and James even used to sit up late at night, talk about how worried they were, for Jesse, for Grace who was distraught, for Matthew.

That was almost a year ago now, and if she looked back on it, she’d put the signs together and realise they really should be worried about James.

Lucie had to look forward. When she was eighteen, she decided, she was going to marry Jesse. Life was too short to not express your love to the people around you in every way that you could. And she hoped against hope that James would be better by then, alive and not dead, and she’d be able to ask him to be her ‘maid’ of honour. Grace would understand: it would mean she and Jesse wouldn’t have to fight about whose bridal party she would be in if Jesse wanted her as his best ‘man’.

It was only just over a year away now. Lucie didn’t care that she would still be in high school. It gave her something to look forward to, to hold onto when things got hard. Which they always were, these days.

“Kit,” Cordelia said one day when he was explaining to her the electromagnetic properties of oxygen, “how much do you know about eating disorders and manic episodes? About derealisation and alcoholism?”

Christopher looked at her, and his face lit up. Good that she asked, she thought. “I love psychology!” he said, and led her to the library, pulling books out onto a table to read through, and logging onto the computer.

Cordelia couldn’t concentrate reading the dense text but with Christopher beside her, photocopying pages to highlight, and emailing professors if they found an abstract of a journal article that seemed really good, she started to learn.

Cordelia soon spent all of her free time studying, and nothing to do with what she was actually supposed to study at school.

Christopher’s older sister, Anna, was studying film at UNSW and he often stole her ID card on weekends to access the libraries there, and Cordelia was ashamed that this was the first time she’d gone with him.

He was good at pointing out the perspectives with which scientists studied mental health: how for some it was a way of gaining control over their patients, inadvertently (or sometimes deliberately) making them feel broken, when actually confidence and self-esteem was key to getting better, while others insisted upon their agency, and seemed to genuinely want people to suffer less, and also lessen the suffering of those around them.

The more they read, the more she realised that there were so many signs she’d seen that she didn’t know what to do with before: James had always, at least in recent years when they’d drifted apart, had moods that were mercurial and shifted for seemingly no reason at all, some days being uncharacteristically extroverted and excitable, flirting with girls with a confidence he didn’t usually have (always making Cordelia jealous), and other days his usual withdrawn self, but some of (okay, a lot of) that time he seemed so utterly exhausted, a desperate pleading in his eyes as if the world was so monotonous that he needed to escape, and on the worst days where he didn’t even talk to anyone, even that small sign of life died.

And it seemed that no one noticed, because despite it all, he always performed. In his classes, in sport and extracurriculars, because no one did as well as James Herondale, he was the last person who would be struggling. Cordelia hated how narrow-minded the views of people in the Shire were.

Christopher didn’t pry as to why she wanted to find out about this: he knew about her father, of course, and his parents were close with Matthew’s family too: he could also connect the dots. Or so she thought. But he was respectful enough to leave her with her privacy to open up in her own time. It was one of the best things about their friendship: he didn’t feel left out.

She wasn’t sure how much he knew about James: their families were distantly related but the Herondales seemed very closed off about it. And for good reason, she supposed: James had always been sensitive to others’ opinions of him, even though he tried to make it seem like the opposite.

And Matthew, Matthew had too. Ever the people pleaser. The two of them seemed like opposites on the surface, but in reality, they were very, very similar.

Cordelia wished that she didn’t make that connection while they were studying mental illness.

She saw herself in some of the studies they read: an insecure girl who always wished she was skinnier. Most of the anorexia patients were like that, scarily like her, with bad home lives and always wanting a sense of control. James wasn’t like that. He had everything: a loving family, good grades and prospects (at least he did, before) girls falling all over him. But Cordelia understood why if none of that satisfied him, he’d want to escape it. His brain would devise things to do.

“Do you mind if I bring Grace along next time?” Christopher asked, sitting cross legged among a pile of open journal papers. “She’s feeling like she’s third wheeling Lucie and Jesse all the time, so I said she could come along, and third wheel us instead.”

Truthfully Cordelia had always been jealous of Grace: of her perfect body, of her proximity to the Herondales, and lately, stealing Christopher away from her too. But what were they trying to understand that Grace herself wouldn’t want to, too? As Lucie’s best friend, she would have had everything confided in her, and effectively been sworn to secrecy aside from her own brother. Cordelia knew when to set aside her insecurity and let in an ally, or so she thought.

She and James were trading letters now, slowly and steadily, and Cordelia wondered if being the messenger was wearing Lucie out. She didn’t dare to ask.

However fucked up it was, Cordelia had everything her younger self ever wanted. It was surreal, and the way it had gone made her feel about a hundred years old. She could handle hanging out with Grace Blackthorn.

Grace was nice, quiet, and knew not to pry.

Cordelia teared up sometimes, mid-book, remembering something like the fact James Herondale was concerned about her, and Christopher would wordlessly get her some tea and a hug.

One in three people with an eating disorder died from it. Usually young women, but not unheard of in men. Boys. Not yet eighteen, James was staying in a children’s hospital.

Some of them recovered, just to relapse again and again, and even if they got better for good—it turned out that if you starve your organs enough times or long enough, there comes a point where they can just fail at any time.

Cordelia looked at her stomach and arms in the mirror and wondered if she cared if she died. This whole thing was making her nauseous. Some days she threw up when she got home. Other days she didn’t have it in her to eat.

One day when the university library (somewhere they were anonymous, thank God, unlike anywhere in Cronulla) was quiet, Grace nudged Christopher and he shut the book he was reading. He walked over to Cordelia and shut hers too, losing the page she was on.

“Daisy,” he said, and Christopher never called her Daisy—sometimes Layla like her family, but only the Herondales, Matthew and Anna ever called her Daisy—“Layla, you’ve gotta tell me if you need a break. I’m starting to think this whole thing is hurting you, and you’ve gotta make sure we don’t do that. You—” he looked at her intently, like she was a science experiment that was misbehaving—“you are objectively gorgeous, and my sister is a dyke who taught me to scientifically analyse female attractiveness and what people, men and women, whatever your choice—who are interested in women see as beautiful. Body types come in and out of fashion, that’s textbook, and in a few years women will be paying thousands to look like you, like they have years before. Whatever thoughts you’re having, I’m here to listen and not judge, to problem-solve with you to minimise harm and maximise your agency over the situation, and I’m in your corner for whatever stage of recovery you are ready for now.”

Cordelia was gobsmacked—not because Christopher wasn’t kind and earnest and always caring, always making sure he did so in evidence-backed ways—but because, fuck, she’d never told him exactly why she was looking at this, so fair enough that he would assume it was for her (and come to think of it, she was wearing jeans she hadn’t worn since Year 9, because all of her newer ones were getting baggy on her, she realised how that looked) and also, belatedly, that in his concern for her he’d been figuring out what to do with both Anna and Grace.

Who had been really respectful, surprisingly so on Grace’s part; clever on Anna’s part (knowing that she still couldn’t compliment Cordelia outright because people saw her as a predator enough as it was, but feeding ‘the evidence points to your best friend being attractive’ to your scientist brother was a way of making it seem irrefutable).

“It’s not for me, it’s about James,” she said in the smallest voice, still unsure if she was lying, still trying to be quiet enough that Grace wouldn’t hear, even though Grace knew damn well about what was going on. And then the dam broke, and Christopher just held her like he did when her father got his DUI.

Dear James,

I don’t know how to say it, but I think you’re right. Today Christopher accused me, in the most complimentary and supportive way ever, of starving myself. Honestly, it’d be easy. So easy.

LUCIE IF YOU ARE READING THIS PLEASE PUT THIS DOWN, PLEASE NOTE I’M BUYING FANCY SEALS TOMORROW AND IF IT IS BROKEN, YOUR SISTER HAS READ THIS

And I don’t know if this helps, but it seems like everything is a risk these days and I don’t think I’ve ever said it: James, you’re fucking gorgeous. I don’t need to be a scientist to see that—never mind me, that one’s a long story, anyway—I think I’d love you though, even if you were fat or ugly or didn’t have the muscles to fill out your wetsuit. If you were sick and paralysed and I had to go to the gym (not because you’re heavy, but because I’m ridiculously unfit) to get strong enough to carry you, I would do it.

I don’t know if that means anything to you. I’m so sleep-deprived I’m going crazy. I’d say sorry if I sound like a creep, but I haven’t scared you away yet for doing that, so I’ll leave it here. WHAT I MEAN TO SAY is that I’m here for you, to listen and not judge, to brainstorm ways of minimising risk if that’s where you’re at, to meet you at whatever stage of healing you’re ready for. And, so is Christopher.

What you’re right about though is that I’ve struggled, feeling worthless and trapped in a life that isn’t mine, without the choices I long to have, for so long. I wonder if it takes one to know one, but if that’s the case, maybe we can survive this life together.

I wish I could be there every moment you feel bad or worthless or numb or trapped or antsy and remind you how I see you, reshape your reality to one where everything feels good and rewarding and you’re seen, truly seen, as you’ve written about longing for. As you’ve told me, even, in conversations I brushed off in recent years—I wish I could turn the world into somewhere you can be vulnerable like that, and when you are, we mobilise to make the future you want, that would best sustain you, into a reality.

I don’t want to fix you, I couldn’t if I tried, you’re perfect as you are anyway, and the real you is the reason it’s worth it—and I hope it’s worth it for you too, if it doesn’t feel like it is now, we can find a way to make that the case—to do whatever we need to to keep you alive. I feel like I’ve barely known you, but that I’m finally now getting the start of getting to know the James under the surface, the one I saw glimpses of intuitively and was always longing to get to know properly.

I know you think that James is irreparably broken. I can’t say I quite agree with that, but if I did, I would say that I think the best things are. Cracks in tinted windows are where the light comes in.

I want to do everything I can to heal your heart. I’ve wanted to, for so long actually, that I’d ask myself—who am I to think that you’ve been hurt a thousand times? I know what I see in your eyes, and I know that for the longest time, I’ve been instinctively looking for someone just like me. But I’ve made assumptions about you for long enough—I know you have thoughts, your own way of rationalising your own experience that I can’t wait to hear about. I hope you get the chance to tell your story, in your own words, and I hope everyone you share it with treats it as precious and doesn’t misconstrue anything.

You’re almost 18 now—may that be a fresh start. I wish I knew enough to plan whatever you might want to make that day special—but honestly I just don’t know what that’d look like, and I feel like you’ve probably had enough of people celebrating you, and never even asking you how. Maybe that’s a wild guess though.

If you give me the all-clear, I do want to see you again (promise I’m not judging) but not, never, in a way that you’re not okay with.

Love,
Daisy

Grace was extra nice to her the next day. Smiling at her between classes, walking her to the tuckshop to buy something for lunch. The two of them sat down with Christopher, enjoying the contrast between the May sun and cool air, outdoors for once. Cordelia caught a glimpse of Matthew, walking with Piers Wentworth, and something tugged at her heart.

“You know,” Grace said, looking at both of them but it seemed it was meant for Cordelia, “my mum used to ration what food I could and couldn’t eat. Said it was about ‘maintaining my body’. I didn’t realise how toxic that was until recently.”

“Your bio mum or your foster mum?” Christopher asked.

“My foster mum—Jesse’s mum.”

Christopher nodded. Cordelia daydreamed. She wasn’t surprised. She also knew what Grace admitted was probably just the tip of the iceberg—whenever she talked about her family, she tended to do something like that too.

They swung by the library at recess, despite knowing that everything useful had long been exhausted. Bipolar and other affective mood disorders made people dangerous, apparently, when unmedicated, more prone to substance abuse and sexual promiscuity. It sounded straight out of a ‘purity’ scare campaign, but nonetheless Cordelia’s chest felt cold.

She heard from Lucie even before getting to pass the letter on, that James wanted her to come back, to see her properly. And even though she had an assignment she needed to do, she agreed.

James was ready for it, the next time Cordelia came to visit him. It was strange, this new normal, but she passed him a folded up piece of paper, and he actually looked forward to whatever was inside.

He’d been—he wouldn’t say he was doing good. Every suppressed emotion from his childhood hitting him all at once, he still broke down daily, his thoughts all scattered.

He’d been told to journal, but he just wrote letters to Cordelia instead. Anything he wrote, was getting whatever was clogged up in his head flowing. That’s what his songwriting teachers always used to say to him.

He had always hated it; hated the way it forced him to be vulnerable. But all the love and pain and frustration needed an outlet.

So he sat down at the piano and played. In a daze, it was almost accidental, the way he found himself doing it almost without realising.

And it was almost bearable.

This time, he was nervous, but he greeted his family all with a hug. He hugged Cordelia too. “Daisy,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

Cordelia was a little shell-shocked; James was like this, he’d always been like this, ridiculously polite at times, when the Mask went up. It was like he knew how to behave, knew how to charm, but didn’t know how to reconcile that with being human and having needs and emotions and sometimes needing people to be there for him.

And if she was honest, that was something she could relate to.

James wasn’t dangerous. He was just human. He’d been hurt before and didn’t know how to process that. He was here because he was learning.

“It’s good to see you too,” she said, and she meant it.

They sat in a circle and it seemed like a bit of deja vu, the way James would catch her eye and smile like they had some sort of inside joke whenever he talked about anything that happened in their grade in the previous year—as Lucie was in year eleven now, she was living a lot of the same experiences, a year later.

She loved the way hearing it from James recontextualised a lot of their shared experiences—it felt like, with him, she felt everything. Every win and every frustration, every setback and hurt that he experienced, was as if she experienced it too. Everything he worried about, every decision he had to make between what other people thought of him and what he wanted. Every time he wanted to run away, every idea he had for something to create.

If she didn’t pay attention to some specific details, she could pretend this was all normal, that she was just at some Herondales’ family gathering or weeknight dinner, as James’ girlfriend.

Cordelia worried a lot, had lots of insecurities, but for a moment, she let herself be. Maybe she was on the way to getting there, maybe not, either way she was going to be there for James now and his family too and they were spending time together now. Maybe that would be enough.

Chapter Text

As Term 2 rolled on, Cordelia felt content, for once in her life.

She talked to James, visited him, or hung out in the library with her friends, learning, discussing things with Christopher who made it easy to see things as he did: like everything they found was just an opportunity to learn more, to arm herself with resources to survive.

She avoided Matthew, but given how fondly James spoke of him (and assumedly he spoke to him, too) she decided to give him another chance.

After all, they were still, supposedly, going to formal together, and that was coming up.

If he still wanted to go to formal with her.

They were getting a limousine, apparently, with Grace and Christopher and Lucie and Jesse. She and Matthew reached a tentative truce through all of the planning, voicing their choices but overall letting Lucie take the lead. Despite being in Year Eleven and only being able to go to formal because she’d been asked by Jesse, Lucie planned the group event like it was second nature to her.

Cordelia knew she should be excited but through all of this planning process all she could think about was James, James, James.

He should be here. Should be messing around with Matthew, scolding his younger sister if she got too egotistical about the whole thing. She invented a new partner for Matthew to go with (Esme Hardcastle maybe, she thought, they were the same kind of weird) so she could go with James. In her head there were two more people in the car when they wrote their names on the sheet outside the Dean’s office. She should be planning her outfit to match James’ not Matthew’s.

She didn’t know why she was grieving—James wasn’t dead. Conversely, he was getting better, eating a bit on his own, less anxious, more stable.

He’d been given the option to come back to Cronulla next term or complete the year through Distance Education. And he’d told her, certain and passionate in a way that brought a fire to his eyes she hadn’t seen for a long time, that there was no way he was going back to that school. Or any school in the Shire, really, they all knew of him.

He didn’t want to pressure himself to finish this year at all, but did want to get it over and done with the best he could. He’d rather have his schoolwork and exams mailed to his house, and sit and do them in front of his mother.

This was miles away from the James Cordelia used to know—who was secretive and rebellious, and would rather die than ever show a drop of vulnerability in front of his parents.

James was strangely excited, though, for his best friend and his—whatever Cordelia was to him, he’d blushed and stumbled over his words—going to formal together.

He got out a week before his 18th birthday, two weeks before formal and the school play.

Cordelia still didn’t have a dress, and the dance was coming up. Matthew had offered to take her shopping to buy one, but she kept making excuses, she was too busy (which she was, and so was he, juggling hours of play rehearsals on top of everything else). She just didn’t want to give the impression that this was anything but friendly, especially since they had kissed back in April, and she knew he was still drinking to get through everything.

Plus, she liked James. Who, she realised, she still didn’t even know if he’d ever had a drinking problem. Maybe she’d just been quick to assume. Maybe, despite his insinuation that she understood him like no one else did (which, come to think of it, Matthew tended to say the same).

In the end, during one of Matthew and Lucie’s extensive play rehearsals, it had been her, James (equipped with Matthew’s bow tie and brightly coloured waistcoat), her mother and Tessa who went out to buy her dress.

Leaving school early due to exam block, they hit up thrift stores and boutique stores (‘there’s no way we can afford that, right Maman’ ‘don’t worry about it, my only daughter is graduating, we’ll find a way’, ‘we’re happy to chip in, and I bet Charlotte would be too’) alike from the Shire all the way up to Bankstown.

In the end she came home with a gold dress, figure-hugging and showing off just the right amount of cleavage, from a store far enough away that Cordelia was sure no one else in her grade would have the same.

She tried it on, and watched James try to keep his composure.

That was definitely something.

It was nice, in an odd way, to be able to spend some quality time with her mother (it had been so long since they last did anything like this, whether it was just the two of them or with anyone else). Family holidays had long since stopped, ever since she learned the truth about her father, ever since Alastair graduated and moved away for university.

And having James and Tessa there too, really, was like a dream come true.

Tessa told them about going shopping with Lucie to buy her dress, and how already, ahead of this year’s formal, she was starting to plan the different outfit she would wear next year.

Cordelia envied the closeness the two clearly had: things were still tense between her and her mother, awkward like a hinge rusted from unuse, clearly needing oiling. She was glad, that today, they had Tessa and James to bridge the silence.

And yet, Cordelia could sense the well-hidden frustration on Tessa’s part, that James wouldn’t go to his own formal. She wouldn’t get to have this experience with him, buying a tuxedo.

Still they bade farewells with happy smiles and James seemed to loosen up a bit, embarrassed as he was to be out in public before the removal of his feeding tube.

That weekend would be his birthday, he was turning eighteen, and would be going clubbing with Matthew. Tessa was clearly worried, but she tried not to show it, and James was even able to make light of the situation ‘there won’t be any chandeliers for me to shoot, I promise’.

He wanted Cordelia to come, too, and when their mothers were lost in conversation, he mentioned how Matthew knew a guy who would print her a fake ID by Friday.

Cordelia declined, embarrassed, not wanting to share why she wouldn’t be drinking. Was it hypocritical, that James had let her in, but she didn’t want to do the same? Maybe. But things were just starting to get normal again with her mother. She didn’t want to reopen the wound.

Still, she had afternoon tea at the Herondales’ on the day of James’ birthday. It was a small gathering, just with the Blackthorn siblings, the Lightwood siblings, her and Matthew and her cousin Jem and James’ family. Thomas also came down from Western Sydney where he was living with Alastair and in his third year of his apprenticeship, but Cordelia’s own brother, someone she hadn’t seen in months, didn’t.

James was celebrating eating actual food again with people he trusted, and so, all around them were his favourite foods. Tessa had been busy.

He didn’t get to starve all day in order to feel the most effects of the alcohol tonight, a rite of passage many people did on their eighteenth, but they made it something worth celebrating anyway.

Lucie was chatty, hyperactive and fully in the mindset of the character she was playing in next weekend’s play. She wanted to go clubbing, too, and pouted at her father when he refused. He drank sherry then and there and wouldn’t even give her any of that, but Will’s tone was teasing and Cordelia could see it was some kind of tug-of-war to them, a thing of playful tradition since long before she was even old enough for a sip of alcohol at family gatherings. Now, when even Jesse would be going to the club with James and Matthew and Thomas later, Cordelia was sure that once the guests were gone, she’d be allowed to drink her parents’ leftover alcohol with Grace in supervised moderation.

It was everything her family never would be, not with the trauma they had around alcohol and the strained relationships too.

The Herondales’ house was well within walking distance but she brought the car that used to be her dad’s (but now, for all intents and purposes was hers) anyway, just to have an excuse to join Lucie in sobriety.

Then, once the celebrations were over, she sat on her bedroom floor, highlighting and going over notes from their past exams and assignments with Christopher, taking the content into her long-term memory ahead of the final external exams in October.

She tried not to think about James going clubbing, out with Matthew (yikes) and Thomas (responsible) and Jesse (she had no idea what to think of him) and how she didn’t mean to be that person but he was still so fragile and she hoped he was okay.

She dropped Christopher home and stared at the books she hadn’t tidied up all over the floor. She felt exhausted, with no motivation to pick them up and even put them in piles so she could walk to her bed.

She sat outside on the chair-swing-thing on the porch, the one that was lopsided because her father broke it once while drunk and they’d never bothered to fix it or get a new one, and pushed the half of it that still kind of swung with her feet, enjoying the cold winter air.

And then a taxi pulled up to her door, and James got out, saw her and just looked so happy that it was her. As if someone had just announced it was his birthday (which, it was, well technically it was after midnight and now tomorrow, but still).

“Daisy!” he said, almost stumbling on his own feet to get to her across the front lawn. “I dreamed of you, and here you are! My angel.” He held her face in his hands, expressive eyes moving as if he was contemplating something, then pinched her cheek, and dragged her to the front door.

She let them both in—what the fuck else was she supposed to do?--and sat him down on the sofa. James had lost his coat, so, just in case, she wrapped a blanket around him to warm him up.

“Jamie what are you doing?” she asked. “Why are you here? Where are your friends?”

“Thomas had to go back to Granville,” he said, serious as if it was something he disapproved of. “And I left Jesse to be the one who has to explain why Matthew isn’t coming home tonight! He met the love of his life, I think, well he told me that no matter who he marries he isn’t gonna love him any more than he loves me, but I think this guy might be a very close second.”

“Matthew’s hooking up with someone?” Cordelia asked.

“He’s not hooking up, he’s making love.” James corrected. “Isn’t love the most beautiful thing in the world? Matthew has Sylvian, you see, and so I just had to come and find you! I told Jesse it was because here was closer to the station than my house when we got in the cab, but I don’t know if he believed me.”

Grace lived near Matthew, Cordelia knew, so it’d stand to reason that Jesse could easily send a message to the Fairchilds on his way home. And Lucie would likely be there, sleeping over with Grace.

Will and Tessa would definitely start to get worried sometime soon.

James was preoccupied holding her hand, but Cordelia could see him starting to nod off.

“Daisy,” he said, “I’m tired, and this blanket smells like you. I want more of it.”

She tried to get him to tiptoe as they walked down the hallway, not that it mattered—her father slept like the dead, and her mother would be wearing earplugs to block out his snoring. It was sad, really, the sacrifices she made for that man—she’d told her, once, that she was only with him because she was scared that he would die if he were alone.

And Cordelia couldn’t help but grieve, the nice man her father used to be, the lightness that it’d been too long since she’d seen in her mother.

She kicked open the door and shuffled all the books over with her foot, cutting a path to her bed for James. He dragged her after him into a sitting position—she wondered if the relief she felt that he was gaining weight was anything like Lucie would’ve felt when Jesse went through rehab to rebuild his wasting muscles after being in a coma, and grieved that she effectively had to go through that twice—and then bent down to take off his shoes for him.

Her mother would kill her for having shoes in the house, but even more so, she’d kill her for having a boy in her room.

Not that anything could happen between them tonight—James was drunk, and Cordelia was sober, and even if he somehow sobered up, she had no condoms and had heard too much about AIDS from Alastair’s activism to ever risk unprotected sex with someone who she didn’t know if he’d been tested.

She thought of her mum, she thought of his parents, and then she tucked him in to her bed.

“I’ll be just a minute,” she said, and in a moment of bravery, kissed him on the forehead. After all, it was his birthday.

“Read to me when you’re back?” James asked. Cordelia smiled, it’d been something they started when she was still visiting him—because as much as he tried to be functional, there were some days where he was sad or tired or nauseous or just feeling off from changing medication.

The tenderness of it all only worked to give her a buzz, and even after this long of it becoming (sort of) their norm, the spell never wore off for her.

Going back to him was all she wanted, when she walked back down the hallway and pulled the house phone cord as long as she could, and dialled the Herondales’ number.

A number she’d long since memorised, and it was nice to pretend she’d only re-memorised it now that she and James had reconnected, rather than sat with the useless information in her head for years, fuelling the sadness and pining and feeling like she’d never be a part of anything, not really.

“Daisy?” Will said, picking up after the third ring. “It’s awfully late, and the kids are both out, did you leave anything behind? Why are you calling?”

Cordelia wondered if he was imagining the tenseness in her voice, and thought back to that summer, how everything for the Herondales would’ve been stress on top of stress, with the way James was always going out (he was manic for the first time, and didn’t know what to do) and Lucie was worrying about Grace’s brother.

“I didn’t leave anything behind, but I do have something of yours,” she teased. Then, deciding to put him out of his misery quickly, she said, “James got his taxi to my place instead of yours. He’s safe, he’s sleeping in my bed, which I am NOT going to join him in.”

Will laughed a bit at that. “Well, at least he’s safe. You take good care of him, Daisy. I’ll let you get back to him then, just—just know that I’m too young to be a grandfather.”

Cordelia hung up and thanked the darkness for covering the burning blush on her cheeks as she tiptoed back to her room. James was fast asleep already, and she poured him a glass of water and some painkillers like they did in the movies. She sat on the floor, remembering the lifelong insomnia he’d told her about, glad that he was getting some rest, a little bit concerned that he might choke on his own vomit.

But he wasn’t that drunk. Cordelia hated that she, someone who had never gone clubbing and only really hung out with Christopher, knew that. Knew how to tell because of her father, the reason she couldn’t just drink and have fun with her peers, why everything in her life was a serious medical risk, why she knew too much first aid and carried too much fear of ending up like him.

But James wasn’t like him. He was just another eighteen-year-old, a young Aussie in the suburbs who’d been through hell but he was still living his life, still having the youth that he deserved. He held his alcohol well, usually, she knew, but the past six months he’d been sober and also so much had changed. It was clear, really, that he hadn’t drank nearly as much as he used to today—he was just getting used to it today, to having fun. Plus he’d barely been out for two hours. Matthew, it seemed, worked quickly. Maybe he really was in love.

She tried not to think about it, but the intrusive thought still came as she watched James sleep, the unopened copy of Layla and Majnun on her lap, bringing back memories of other days with the same boy and the same book. Maybe she was in love too.

“Do you still do gymnastics?” James asked, like he’d slotted right back into her life from years ago and didn’t realise that she’d stopped back when she was fourteen. When she got her period and didn’t want to train wearing a bulky pad, and none of her sports bras were supportive enough—and also, later that year, everything would go down with her father. She couldn’t remember the exact time that she stopped, it was more of a phase-out thing of training every afternoon to once a week and then not at all.

He’d eaten breakfast with her family (or what was left of it, with Alastair moved out and her dad never functional before noon), charmed her mother like he always did, hiding his hangover well.

And then she’d offered to walk him home, taking the long way across the beaches facing the bay, the little rock walls lined up in perfect even distances apart. Even on this side of Kurnell which was so much warmer than Cronulla or anywhere else, it was still too cold to comfortably swim. Still, back in the heyday Cordelia used to do laps along here all year around, maintaining her fitness and her flexibility for gymnastics. Water was good, it was gentle on your body and joints especially as she grew and had more weight to carry on the parallel bars or the rings.

She shook her head, sighing, hoping he wouldn’t press any further.

“You were really good, I remember,” James said. “I was always jealous. I’m decently good at balancing on things, but I could never do a handstand.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve done a handstand,” Cordelia laughed self-deprecatingly. Boobs in her face? No thank you.

“I get it,” James said. “You don’t have to do everything just because you liked it once.”

Honestly Cordelia always liked gymnastics, she probably still would now if maintaining that level of fitness wasn’t so exhausting. It was one of those things, where the better you got at it, the easier it was to lose that skill, and once you lost it, learning the second time never was as fun as it was the first.

But all she said was, “I think I’d like to try fencing, actually. Maybe next year, when things are less crazy.”

“Maybe next year,” James agreed.

Despite everything he told himself, James still wasn’t prepared for when he got to the pre-formal celebration at Matthew’s house and saw Cordelia all dolled up in her dress and makeup. And it was weird—because he kept forgetting, but she wasn’t dressed like this to be his. She was going to formal with Matthew, not him, but still the adults all made them pose for photos together, made sure he was in the group.

As they all lined up for a group photo together Matthew seemed to get some sort of notification from his brand-new mobile phone, and rushed off. Charlotte shook her head, and took a photo of the six of them without her. In his father’s suit, James felt like he was Cordelia’s date for a moment. He could almost imagine, in a world where that wouldn’t mean he’d have to face his classmates, that this fantasy was real.

Matthew came back an eternity later, a boy with him, and James watched Cordelia double take and look between him and the other boy. He wondered what that was about—and then he remembered, foggy memories of loud base and dim but flashing strobe lighting, this was the boy from the club who Matthew hooked up with. Sylvian. Matthew looked at him, made a few subtle gestures and James realised what he was saying: here, he’s someone to keep you company while the rest of us do all the boring school things. Show him around Cronulla.

And whatever Matthew asked him, James would listen.

Matthew was polite, present and yet distant in the way that told Cordelia he’d grown. And she looked at Sylvian, the spitting image of James, and had more questions than answers but she was glad.

Lucie had told her once, that when Matthew had a crush on you, you could notice when he didn’t anymore. Apparently he’d liked her for years, and Lucie before that.

But now, when she looked at Sylvian, she wondered if at any point, he’d liked James too.

She’d never even thought to view Matthew as ‘competition’ though she knew now that James liked him a lot more than any of the other girls fawning over him in their grade.

She didn’t even know if he liked boys either, but the way he avoided them told her all she needed about what he thought of the rest of their grade.

Matthew held her hand and helped her out of the limo, ate the leftovers of her meal and they danced together until she could barely balance in her stilettos. He whispered funny things to mock the other kids doing speeches or giving out ‘joke awards’ voted on by the teachers. This whole school was a joke in a lot of ways, finding ways to celebrate mediocrity and yet always making you feel like nothing you did was ever enough, it could be better. Cordelia would be glad to be gone, and it seemed like Matthew would too.

She let him drag her along to the afterparty, even if through all of it, she was wishing James was there too. Having ditched her shoes, Matthew tied a fancy knot in the front of her dress, hiking it up so it was short enough for her to walk without tripping.

Someone’s parents from her grade owned the gym overlooking the beach, and with the equipment pushed to the side, it was probably still a dangerous setup for intoxicated teenagers. But Cordelia didn’t have much time to think about it, because Matthew was dragging her into a dark storeroom, and she saw the shadow of someone who looked like James slip out.

Then the light flicked on, and there was James, like she’d wished for him and there he was, looking at her in a way that made her feel grown-up and sensual and youthful all at once, like she never thought she’d have the chance to be. He was saying something about Matthew wanting to introduce his boyfriend to the rest of the grade ‘and scandalise them’ and how he really appreciated it if she would keep him company, so he wouldn’t rot away in boredom until the party left.

Cordelia was more than eager for that.

They danced together to the sound of the music reverberating from the party, making the tacky 2000s pop songs seem almost romantic. And then they were kissing and it was everything Cordelia could’ve dreamed of and more. James tasted sweet, so much better than Matthew (no offence to him or Sylvian, they were meant for each other, and she was meant for James) but what she couldn’t believe even despite the evidence in front of her, her body always reminding her and her brain stuck like a buffering disk on the young teenager who would be happy for the whole day if James so much as looked at her. It was telling her, there was no way James liked her back.

But his hands were all over her, a musician’s fingers, callused and gentle and tactile and sensitive, able to fine-tune the smallest of movements. She let hers roam too, whispering to him that he was beautiful in the kiss as if he’d be able to hear.

And then her dress was coming undone over her boobs they came up for air, starting at someone rattling the door, a drunken teenager falling over or maybe a couple looking for a place to hook up.

“It’s locked,” James said. He then grabbed a pack of towels from the shelf, opened it, and started wrapping one around her. He looked at her for permission to tuck it in, as if he hadn’t just been touching—well—everything—and she nodded.

He picked up her shoes and put them on the tiny windowsill behind her, half hidden by the shelves.

“I wanted to know if Daisy the gymnast was still in there,” he said, “so we can get out of here. And after that I’d say she’s just fine. What do you think?”

Cordelia nodded, breathless, hiking up her dress and stuffing it under the towel that kept her much more decent anyway. She giggled as James got down on one knee, imagining another situation (not that escaping out of a window wasn’t exciting) and he gestured for her to stand on his leg.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I’m pretty heavy.” And you’re only just getting better.

“You’re perfect, Daisy,” he said, charming and impatient all at once, “I’ve got you.”

And so she climbed on James and squeezed out the window, happy to realise there was a ladder already waiting on the other side. Clever. James hoisted himself up, sat on the bookshelf, tossed her another towel, and picked up a broom. Cordelia watched, fascinated, as he used it as a lever to unlock the door, ready for the next high school couple. Then she climbed down the ladder to make room for him to climb out the window. Even after all these years, they still worked as a team, wordless, seamless.

Cordelia was glad that North Cronulla was still wild enough, that it was possible to go skinny dipping at the beach at night and not be frowned upon for public indecency. Well, close enough to that. Discarding her dress and towel on the beach, she was in nothing but her thong, trying to cover her boobs with quickly-dropping hair. (She wondered where her hairpins were, probably leaving a trail leading to everywhere she’d been that night). James stripped down to his boxers and she let herself ogle his abs and V-line for a moment before plunging into the icy water.

They splashed around for a bit, teeth chattering, moving around for warmth, then James spotted on the horizon some people from school who had the same idea so they wrapped themselves in towels, picked up their stuff and ran.

They ran like that, barefoot on the beach and then half-jogged up the walking track to Kurnell. Even though she was pretty much dry by now, the wind was nipping and icy and Cordelia was sure she was going to get hypothermia. She huddled into James and held up her dress as if it would block the wind.

James wrapped his shirt and jacket around the both of them, and helped Cordelia shimmy into her dress, just to keep warm. Hyper aware of the feeling of his body against hers, of the fact that she was leaning into him, braless, wet hair making a patch on his jacket, teeth still chattering and feet bare and numb with the cold, she took in the familiar path to Kurnell like it was the first time. She’d grown accustomed to it over the years, but could it be that she never noticed its beauty? The stars above them in full view, dotting across the sky. The harsh rocks and the native vegetation, all the animals inside it, asleep. The steep cliffs the two of them sometimes got a view of, sometimes pausing on the path or cautiously stepping off it to watch the waves crashing against the rocks. The view of the national park, a patch of darkness on the horizon, and as they approached home, the lights of the airport and Port Botany and the far-off skyline of the city.

It was possible Kurnell was the most beautiful place on earth, and Cordelia had just never noticed it.

She tried to do something complicated to knot the train of her dress around her legs, half for the warmth and half in a futile effort to keep it clear of dirt and twigs and the kind of scrapes that came from dragging it across gravel and old boardwalk.

She clung to James extra tightly as they walked through the bush to the entrance, to the road that would take them home. The Herondales’ house was just around the corner from the cafe there, and James informed her that there was no way she was going any further without being warmed up.

So she found herself in the bathtub in Will and Tessa’s ensuite, which apparently they would give at the drop of a hat if James was bringing her home. She tried not to think too hard about that, just take note of their bedroom when she walked through it, trailing twigs and gumnuts with her, dirtying their carpet. The messy sheets that looked right out of a Scandinavian home magazine, the books on the bedside table and violin in the corner.

She tried not to think about it, but she still wondered if she and James might have a room like this in the future. If they had a future.

Her skin burned as the sensation in her limbs came back in the hot water. Somewhere in the other bathroom, James was showering too, and Cordelia was glad that even with the water at the hottest setting, it was still lukewarm at times, giving her burning skin a break. But then she was glad when it warmed up again, filling the bath and warming her up and soon enough it was too hot to touch, so she just scrunched herself up at the other end of the bath and let the steaming tap warm up her just-warm water.

Tessa had promised she’d call Cordelia’s mother, let her know where she was, safe back in Kurnell after the events of the night.

Lucie, apparently, was still at the afterparty and Will was about to go and get her, trying to make sure she at least got some sleep before the opening night of the school play tomorrow.

Technically today, because it was after midnight.

Cordelia sat in the nice-smelling bath in the Herondales’ house and welcomed the new day, reflected on the happiest and most adventurous night of her life.

The Year 12’s had the day off the next day, being a Friday, and somehow, Cordelia (or a mixture of her, Matthew and Lucie) convinced James to come to the play with her and his parents.

Jesse and Grace tagged along with them, siblings chatting at a distance as they walked in after having all piled into Tessa’s Audi.

Cordelia didn’t understand the plot of A Midsummer’s Night Dream one bit, but she felt the irony of hosting it so close to the winter solstice. Either way, Matthew and Lucie both looked amazing and acted even better. She could hardly tell that they were hungover.

Beside her, James was quiet and stiff and avoided eye contact with anyone they knew, but he smiled at her and held her hand. This was a big day for him, she knew, wanting to be there for his best friend and his sister, and she was proud that he’d actually managed to do it.

“I couldn’t have done this without you,” he later confessed in the car, and that meant more to Cordelia than the free ticket she got from the Herondales, and was more enjoyable and poignant than the entire work they just watched.

No offence to Matthew and Lucie, of course.

Stay with me, she silently begged, please don’t let this slip away.

We made it, were the undertones of the end of term, and the end of the weekend of play shows. Matthew got drunk one last time with his classmates, Cordelia heard from Lucie when she got back from (yet another, but this time for the theatre geeks specifically) afterparty. Because he wasn’t coming back to the school for term three. He’d be graduating, like James, through Sydney Distance Education High School, and was taking the time to learn flexibly and get better.

Sceptical but proud, Cordelia piled the four of them—she, James, Matthew and Christopher—into her father’s old car and drove (occasionally switching over with Christopher, who drove so erratically that she always regretted it) to Canberra.

Matthew had wanted to see snow, apparently. James had dragged her and Christopher along to be sober drivers. (And a car, too, since Lucie was practising for her test in his, and Matthew’s ridiculous sports car couldn’t be driven by anyone else).

They bantered through the days driving or walking through the too-well planned streets of Canberra, down to the icy Murrumbidgee in Gundagai, and up the winding roads of Mt Kosciusko.

But it was in the nights when Cordelia truly felt like herself, where they would all go and do their own things—Matthew to a club or some pub, Christopher getting out whatever trinkets and chemicals he’d collected from each of their pit stops and doing something sciency, and she and James would just find somewhere to stargaze. Away from the blinding light and expectation of the daylight they could finally be themselves, be free, and every night in every new location they found a motel in was another one like the night of her formal in Kurnell.

She’d remember the dread she was feeling and the fear of it all falling apart in hindsight, but for now, she did her best to ignore it. To feel the high, a classic love story, take in the smell of the different kinds of eucalyptus in the Australian scrub and James, James, James.

Chapter Text

I see this life,

a paper kite,

oh but if you let it go before you build it right,

you’ll never see it fly

- tina arena, lie in it

Term 3 was different without Matthew.

It was the last term that the Year 12’s would have classes, and Cordelia was reminded of the years when James and Matthew got popular, and she and Christopher were left as what they were again: outsiders.

Well, kind of. Grace and Lucie were popular, despite being a year younger, and the four of them hung out more often than not. With Jesse, when he was around, but he seemed to have a lot of medical and sporting commitments. Cordelia felt like she and Lucie could bond over that, but they never said it out loud.

She was reminded of the years of travelling, living in Bali and Tasmania and Perth and so many places in between for her father’s health, homeschooling, back when all boys had cooties except for Alastair, and she wrote letters to her only friend, Lucie Herondale, whose parents were friends with her cousin.

It had meant the world to her at the time, but she had just been one of many friends to Lucie.

The truth was that Cordelia wasn’t the only one who was new in Year 8. While Lucie got to start high school afresh that year, James, Matthew, Christopher and their friend Thomas had all gotten into a selective boys’ school for Year 7.

That had been a short-lived experience. The three of them in her grade had been expelled at the end of Term 3. Having grown up in Kurnell together, Cronulla High was the only one who would take them after that stunt. Thomas had moved schools, too, at the end of the year.

It had been an accident, really, according to everyone but Alastair (who had been finishing Year 10 at the same school). Christopher’s overconfident scientific curiosity had caused a small explosion. Matthew and James had been involved, Cordelia didn’t know how. All she knew was that the repairs took weeks.

She remembered how Christopher had been that first year, shy and embarrassed, ashamed to do what he loved but gravitating back to it eventually. She looked back now, and was glad to see him growing in his confidence. His parents were good for him, so was his older sister.

She’d lost Alastair then, she thought, when he hadn’t made it into the Year 11 program at the next fancy school most of his classmates went to for years 11 and 12, and her parents had made the decision to come to Kurnell, same as the Herondales. For Cordelia and Alastair to start at Cronulla High, just like their children.

She’d lost Alastair, but she’d found James and Christopher, and he’d found Thomas Lightwood (eventually, but still).

Cordelia trudged through the school, feeling a lot like she imagined Alastair had those years. When her family had finally settled down, in the far reaches of the satellite community known as the Shire, and he was dragged back from boarding school to live with them again.

2000 had been the year of the Olympics, and 2004 was again, just in a different country. (Sydney couldn’t take that much fuss again, of that she was sure.)

Where it sometimes seemed like James and Matthew were, thriving far away, until she went to James’ house to study after school with Christopher and his support worker went home and he told her it was hard, but so, so much better than striving and masking and everything he had to do, all that fake confidence that cumulated to a point, at their school. (Daily panic attacks were still better than that, apparently. Cordelia wondered how bad it had been, how much he had to keep hidden.)

He told her that on a date, an actual date at a restaurant paid for with his parents’ money. James was looking for a part-time job, apparently, toying with the idea of taking on piano students. He was waiting for his Working With Children Check clearance. He wasn’t sure if they’d let him, and Cordelia wondered if she should be seeing a red flag. She didn’t know what to think, if it was something as stupid as the fact that he was dating a seventeen-year-old, despite only being two months apart? She was naive, she realised, didn’t know much about the world at all.

Cordelia didn’t make much of a fuss about her eighteenth birthday. They went clubbing, just the four of them: her, James, Matthew and Sylvian. The two of them seemed to be going well—she found out that he was an international university student from France, eighteen years old, almost nineteen, and he loved swimming in the winter because according to him “Sydney winters are the same temperature as French summers”.

Then the next day she took herself to a doctor’s clinic far enough away, and got a prescription for Yasmin, the combined birth control pill. Maybe she was being optimistic and delusional, maybe she knew that with James or not, she’d lose her virginity at some point, probably soon, and although there was no way she wouldn’t use a condom, she still didn’t want that to also involve a pregnancy scare.

Mostly she just wanted to feel grown up, for once in her life.

James had thought, for many years, that the bullying hadn’t affected him.

That when he hit his growth spurt and surfing and piano became popular things to do and he and Matthew became popular seemingly overnight and he had forgotten about all the trauma of his old school.

He’d been lucky, recently, to on top of finding out everything else about himself and getting medicated, that he was given words to the anxiety he’d experienced for most of his life and the people-pleasing tendencies he’d developed.

The way he went along with everything anyone expected of him, and left Cordelia and Christopher behind without a thought—except, they were all he was thinking about. In different ways. The disconnect between his inner self and the life he lived was so large that he couldn’t control how he behaved in public, how much of a douchbag he must be, irritable in the way he knew teenage girls found attractive, never letting out how he was really feeling because in the moment, he couldn’t even remember it.

The only things that connected him to that scared, broken innermost self were music and writing. The songs he composed became something like a lifeline until he lost the ability to do that too, and he only felt in touch with how his body felt, whether it was hungry or angry or horny or sad, when he was feeling every little movement during surfing.

He pushed himself hard trying to be everything everyone thought he was, thinking it was easier, the path of least resistance.

The perfect recipe for burnout, for the bipolar depression he’d struggled with for years without ever realising, for the manic episodes that seemed to come out when too much of himself was stuck below the surface while he was running on autopilot, that it all came to a head and the rage and energy and excitement and need to rebel, to be himself, came out a thousand times stronger than if he hadn’t (unconsciously) bottled it up to begin with.

He was scared of being himself, he always had been.

And if the James he was when he was manic, when he was most vulnerable and honest, wasn’t himself, then he didn’t know who it was.

But he didn’t want that person to be who he was. Why did he do all of those things? Was he really that horrible?

James kept doing what he did best. He pushed it down.

Cordelia and James would go down to the rocks in Kurnell on a near weekly basis. It was there he asked her to be his girlfriend; it was there he asked her to the (previously unheard of) Distance Education Formal.

They lie on the edge of the cliffs, watching the stars, off the path with the waves crashing below. Enjoying the feeling of flirting with danger, how one wrong move, shaking from the cold wind, could send them plunging to certain death below.

Cordelia didn’t think she’d survive if James died. He said the same about her. And yet, there they went, too close to the edge, and she lost track of whose idea it was to begin with.

Slowly but surely, James was getting into the hang of studying for his exams. He’d lose himself in flashbacks, but good ones this time—of being a kid who loved maths and reading, loved solving the problems and expressing himself, still too young and sheltered to realise that he would later be bullied for it.

It was better, much better, than those awful flashbacks or even the more recent ones, of sitting down and being completely unable to do things he had once found easy.

Depersonalisaton, they called it. Apparently James had a fragmented sense of self. And he knew himself enough by now to know that was right.

They’d argued for weeks about whether the diagnosis he came away with was going to be multiple personality or bipolar disorder. Apparently they were different, though frequently mixed up. For James, as it turned out—he likely had both, apparently, but only bipolar could be diagnosed before the age of eighteen and the patterns of his moods, the highs and the lows, were obvious. Feeling invincible, then feeling helpless and broken.

He was eighteen now, and had some idea that the fragments of himself, the parts that came to the front sometimes and made it so that he didn’t remember chunks of his life, were tied to states of terror and fear. And that terror and fear came from expectations that mounted so high without him realising, because they built up so slowly. They weren’t the same as the raging energy or the soul-sucking despair that gave him either the ability to get through the massive workload he gave himself, or the complete inability to string his thoughts together well enough to stand up for himself against the momentum, to articulate when he wanted rest when all he thought that he wanted was dying.

James was scared of himself. He felt like he shouldn’t be by now, but it was likely that he always would. He was scared of what the world had made him. Someone so curious to learn and express himself, but someone so scared to do either of those things that parts of his brain shut off and made him unable to do so unless he was high on a specific drug his brain seemed to create all by itself. One he needed so many medicines to tame, and even then, they might not do that job entirely. He still had to work to connect to all the parts of himself, and that was exhausting.

Cordelia, though—she was a different kind of drug, one that made him feel so known and safe and high in a way that was scary and comforting all at once. He wanted to be a better person for him. To hide all the parts of himself that she might, rightfully, be scared of. But he couldn’t do that.

James had been told from a young age that he was talented and gifted, a genius of some sort, creative and academic and expressive and well-coordinated. He was told he could be so many things, and he knew now the only way he was going to be any of those things, or even have a hope at living a somewhat normal life without entire teams of people revolving around him just to keep him calm, just to keep him from panicking, lot in the unpredictability of flashbacks of a lifetime of too much pressure that could either be joyful or terrible, was with Cordelia by his side.

Yet he didn’t want to put that pressure on her. She of all people, someone who had always been kind and loyal and never bitter even when she deserved to be, deserved to be free. To not have to clean up the pieces of the mess that someone else made, many someones, a system designed to find kids who were good at things and then exploit them.

James could see his younger self now, fragile and vulnerable, being built up by praise for liking books and sums and art of all kinds and a knack for balancing on objects in turbulent water. Torn down by his peers for the same things, ripped up like paper, opposing pressures that could never do anything good, then released in the world too soon, without anything to resolve that tension.

Only the mounting belief that he had to please everyone even when it was contradictory, could never decide his own fate.

Distance Ed formal rolled up, and they dressed up to go, the four of them—James and Cordelia, Matthew and Sylvian. They took photos together in the Fairchilds’ yard, before being bundled into Matthew’s fancy car and driven all the way to somewhere in the city. James already knew that even though he planned on being (at least mostly) sober, he was overwhelmed enough from everything that was going on, worrying him, and all the study he was doing and the love-hate relationship he now realised he had with it, that most of this night would not stick in his memory.

James seemed off, Cordelia thought, and she wondered when it was that she became so perceptive of the moods of the men around her. Wondered if this was a gift for her relationship, or if she was just repeating patterns in a new environment, that she’d used to survive living with her father for so many years.

They danced, they drank the definitely-not-spiked punch (Cordelia had to believe that, she was going to be sober, wasn’t going to turn into her father) and she tried to tease it out of him. She was a hypocrite for trying that, she knew. She looked over at Matthew and Sylvian. It seemed like all the secrets were out between the two of them, and she couldn’t help but be jealous.

"There's something I've been hiding from you, Daisy, and it might make you think of me differently," said James. Finally. But also, God damn it.

"There's something I've been hiding from you, too," Cordelia said.

"I'm paying off my parents who covered the repairs to someone's prosthetic leg that I shot."

"My dad is an alcoholic."

They just stared at each other.

"I'm never getting my hands on a gun again," James said, clearly embarrassed and trying to talk himself out of his shame, a James that Cordelia had seen (and had mixed feelings about) a hundred times before. "That was reckless and crazy and thoughtless, I could have easily killed someone."

"I thought—I thought you had a drinking problem like my father, I thought maybe that was why you did it," Cordelia said, the cogs in her brain refusing to turn because had she really invented the signs, made up a story that was familiar to bury her head in the sand about instead of acknowledging a reality where a sober James would be capable of such violence?

"Oh," James said. "Oh my God." She watched him deliberate about what to say next. "I don't know if the reality is any better, honestly, but I can promise you one thing Daisy, and that's that I am not your dad."

And it was like he could see through her, see to the violence and the fear that she told nobody about. The cycle, straight men were always this way, the way her mother would say that to comfort herself. The dread coursing through her veins as she faced the reality she'd been avoiding, blinded by love despite Lucie telling her the story all those months ago, despite the research she'd done, studied so much that she'd decided on her career path from it. The way she was watching her father slowly dying. At least that was not something she'd have to watch James go through? Or so she thought, she really didn't know anymore.

"He's got liver cancer, stage 1 but it'll kill him as he's not eligible for treatment unless he stops drinking."

“I’m so sorry, Daisy,” James said.

Cordelia nodded. She was numb, so many things going through her head. James wasn’t an alcoholic, at least not now, but not only had he shot a chandelier, he had shot someone. Their prosthetic leg, more a disability aid than an actual body part that could bleed and be a risk to their life, but the principle was there.

Cordelia felt like she should be scared, but she felt nothing at all.

August rolled into September and Cordelia found herself still processing, still hanging out with James and going out and making out and instead of being scared, she found herself wondering what a gun felt like to shoot. How hard it was to aim, how confident you could be that the bullet wasn’t going to ricochet and hurt someone it wasn’t meant to hurt.

She’d try fencing when she got to university, she decided.

Which reminded her, she had to start getting onto her university applications.

James was telling her about his piano students, young children who reminded him in the simple basicness of their playing, how much he loved the instrument. How he could feel childlike awe again through them. Cordelia was happy for him. She was a little jealous.

He might try the same with surfing this summer, he said, one thing at a time, getting back into what he loves.

James was practising a piano piece he was going to use to audition to the Conservatorium. Cordelia was wondering where she’d study—at UNSW where Christopher was pretty much guaranteed to get into, or did she want to go somewhere closer to James? Psychology was a degree that a lot of universities offered and frankly, Cordelia didn’t know what difference it would make to go to one over the other. Maybe she would choose based on which offered extracurricular fencing.
She paid a lot of attention to James these days—to his habits, whether he was drinking (which, really was almost never, she didn’t know what she’d gotten herself so worried about), how he tasted when they kissed. She’d gotten a vague understanding already of his medicine routine, that if he ever forgot, she thought she could remind him. She thought it cute how he both relied on and despised reminders to eat, often needing her around as a distraction because part of him still didn’t want to put food into his body. He was working out again though, starting slow, and when Cordelia tried to keep up with him she couldn’t. He was far too fit.

Term 3 was drawing to a close and with it, Cordelia’s schooling life. Yes she’d be back for exams, but really, this week was it for them—saying goodbye to their teachers, having all the materials they needed to study for their HSC exams.

In their last week, it was a tradition for Cronulla High to have its annual Careers Day, where the graduating class would dress up as whatever they wanted to do after school.

Cordelia had found a suit of armour when she was out shopping with Christopher, and a fencing sword. There was no set outfit for a psychologist. They just wore normal clothes. She sighed, looking at her wardrobe. She didn’t care what people thought anymore.

Cordelia realised, belatedly, how she was feeling as she walked into the gates with a white lab coat-clad Christopher, conical flasks filled with (what she hoped was) food colouring peeking out of his pockets. Her armour clanked as she walked, and she was half sure she was going to be sent home. She was angry.

Angry because of who should’ve been here, bright shiny careers they were ready to tell all their teachers about. Angry because the school didn’t offer any other narrative, not really, it was succeed or just disappear into the margins, not be spoken about anymore. Angry because she knew that at least in part it was the pressure of school and expectations that drove Matthew to drink, and James to his breaking point. Angry because she had to live all of this and no one knew, no one cared enough to find out, and if they did, they ignored it in favour of the narrative and facade they chose to maintain. Ignoring the priceless talent they promised to build up and instead broke. They needed to do better.

One day when Cordelia was a psychologist, she would publish some papers debunking the idea that treating children like this in the name of education was good or helpful for anyone. She would propose alternatives, backed up by science (as Christopher always liked to say). She would change the world. Maybe that’s why she was dressed up in a full set of armour today, ready to fight the school and all of the assumptions it was based on.

She didn’t miss the dirty looks, the whispers, the teachers rolling their eyes—but at the end of the day, no one said anything to her directly. She’d respond to asks about what people said sometimes honestly ‘a children’s psychologist’ sometimes jokingly ‘a fencer’ but really, all of these were things she planned on doing next year. She just had to get there. Get through the rest of this year, of this week and this school and all its memories of the people it just threw away and left her without the resources on how to love properly.

She saw Catherine and Rosamund and Thoby basking in the attention. They all knew what they were going to do next year, flaunting it, and Cordelia couldn’t care less. Matthew would’ve loved to have had the chance to do that. James, not so much.

She watched Christopher receive the award for Dux and she wished she’d been there for him more while he wrote his Valedictorian speech. She was stuck in a world where things were different—he’d earned that title, every last scrap of work he did was so much harder than anyone else.

But even though he worked hard and was passionate in ways she had the privilege to be able to see up close, see that he wasn’t putting it on like some people thought he was, she wondered why the only reason he was able to get that award was because he hadn’t (yet) broken down, that the timing was right for him this year instead of say, a year earlier, when had they been in Year 12 then it would’ve been James and Matthew, winning awards, stunning everyone. Christopher was only 17. Maybe there was something to be said for going to school a little younger. Maybe it meant you could postpone the breakdown just a little bit, and the marks that would define so much of your life—they wouldn’t be ruined before even getting the chance to show how good you were.

Cordelia’s father didn’t come to her graduation, but her mother was there, with Alastair and Thomas and James and his parents and Matthew and Sylvian. Christopher stumbled through his speech, nervous in a way that was rare for him, and honestly, other than that, she didn’t really remember much of that day. She was lucky, she told herself, that even without her father there she still had so many people supporting her. But his absence was still cutting.

Cordelia didn’t know what to do with the anger when she walked out of the gates, away from the school that for whatever reason, loved to build its students up so much in a fake and fragile way that just ended up tearing them down. They didn’t deserve to see their (former) students shine. Fly out of the nest, far, far away from the Shire.

Neither did their father, Alastair told her, but Cordelia wasn’t going to admit that.

Instead of going straight to an afterparty with people from their grade Cordelia didn’t care to see, she went home with her friends who had deserved so much better. Matthew and Sylvian ditched them in the end to go to some afterparty, and she and James and Christopher—who was mostly busy catching up with Thomas—considered joining them. Cordelia didn’t really want to, but James deserved a chance to go, to get that kind of closure.

They put off the decision, talking about anything and everything on the Herondales’ front porch in Kurnell. James had auditioned for the Conservatorium, and though Cordelia knew that there was almost no chance of him not getting in, he was still nervous when he didn’t feel like he was back to the prodigy he was before, and didn’t know whether they could access his medical records and refuse him on those grounds.

And so they just talked about dumb things they’d done. Cordelia wanted to make him feel better, though honestly, the worst she’d probably done was conspired to help Christopher steal chemicals from the science lab at school. Nothing like shooting a gun.

“Why did you do it?” Cordelia asked.

James sighed. “Would it be weird if I said it was loosely because of you?”

Chapter Text

James’ parents, as he found out much later, had been worried about him for years.

He’d been a quiet child, socially anxious, afraid of bright lights and loud noises. He’d been a curious one too, teaching himself to read at a young age, showing a readiness to learn that meant he would’ve been ready to start school at four and a half—if he could say a word to another child without hiding behind his father’s legs. He hadn’t repeated kindergarten like Matthew had, years pre-ADHD diagnosis, but his June birthday meant he was right on the cusp of whether he went to school the same year as Cordelia and Christopher, or a year earlier.

He’d been the one to make the decision, apparently, in the end—although he didn’t remember it. After that, during the year, his parents had taken him to all sorts of things in hopes of getting him out of his shell. Little social events, things that weren’t too far out of his comfort zone. He’d trail along behind them, carrying a book, letting Lucie make friends and charm everyone and be fickle in the way that three-year-olds were, going between idolising him and calling him a ‘meanie’.

Still, he hadn’t made any friends at school for years.

Matthew had been the first, after spending a year with no one and then another year trailing behind his younger sister. James had always wanted to befriend Thomas, who was quiet like him, and tiny despite being in the year older, the year Matthew had started school with.

James had always been scared away by Matthew, being sure that he could never break into their bond. Even if Christopher did, and Christopher was possibly even weirder than him.

Matthew had been annoying, and what he had been most annoying about was wanting to be James’ friend. His parents had loved him from the start. Lucie brought home many different friends from a young age, but the first one that James brought home was Matthew.

His parents had cried, more recently, when James had finally confessed to him that he’d known what Matthew was going through for years, and been worried about him.

Did they know how hard it was for him, for years during and also before that? Did they recognise the insecurity, the way he learned to dissociate from how he was feeling just to get through each day? Did he want them to know?

James had spent a good portion of his life hiding from them, hiding the truth that would break their hearts. The truth was out in the open now. Mostly.

Now, he was tired all the time but he’d take that over the nights where he stayed up, pacing, nothing that he thought of in his racing mind making any sense. He’d learned, more slowly than he wanted to admit, that when that happened he needed to reach out to someone. Not always a health professional, yet, he’d been able to compromise—but for now it worked to talk to Uncle Jem, his parents’ closest friend—and also Cordelia’s cousin. James didn’t know if that was weird.

He knew it was definitely, probably, weird, exactly how he was affected by her and had been ever since long before they were even dating, back even when they were barely talking. Back when he’d hang off any whisper anyone said about her or any word he said, but made sure to never admit anything about it out loud. James was a ticking time bomb in a lot of ways. Daisy—and only Daisy—could just as easily defuse him as she could destroy him.

“What do you mean?” Cordelia asked. She barely registered it as Thomas dragged the three of them into his car, saying something about Alastair going to see Cordelia’s parents and wanting her and Christopher to be able to get to an afterparty after all. She just stared at James.

“You remember New Years? The party at Christopher’s?”

And Cordelia did. The one place she allowed herself to drink, under the watchful eyes of Anna and Cecily and Gabriel who knew all about her, knew her story and her family and why she stayed away from alcohol at any other time.

It wasn’t only because she liked to be in control of what she did and said, the perfectly-maintained mask, or facade that she so hypocritically always hoped James would drop his of. Though Cordelia was terrified at the prospect of doing anything she couldn’t control or wouldn’t afterwards remember, she was also terrified of who she might become, if she really was so much like her father—the ‘sensitive ones’ in her family, was she also prone to addiction? That was why, at the Lightwoods’, it was safe, it was monitored, and she felt more at home than she did anywhere else.

“This—this is going to come out by far the wrong way because it was absolutely not only to do with this, but, I don’t know if you remember but I could’ve sworn I heard some girls from school ask you about me.”

That—that sounded fair enough. Nosy bitches. Cordelia always controlled what she said around the likes of Rosamund—even Esme, though she was nice enough, could easily be a bit of a gossip—making sure she was never too vulnerable. Even slightly intoxicated, she knew now, she would’ve maintained that.

“They weren’t asking if you liked me, not really, but I got curious, and it was to my detriment I guess.” He looked so broken in that moment, a glimpse of that boy Cordelia had been abducted by Lucie to see in the hospital.

What had Cordelia said? She tried to rack her brain for it, just one of many interactions like that, being egged on by the popular girls who knew that she and James had been friends back in the day. Nothing of substance, she was sure. She was good at avoiding the question. But oh.

“Oh my God,” Cordelia said.

James stared at her, clearly catching the horror on her face. Tears filled the corners of his honey-gold eyes as quickly as he could blink them away.

“Jamie, darling, I am so sorry,” Cordelia laughed a bit, internally, at just how much like Matthew she must’ve sounded then. Matthew would never had said such a thing about James. She still couldn’t quite remember the details, but was starting to recall the gist of it.

She’d been bitter, angry at being left behind by no fault of James’ own, seen as a nerd with Christopher, seen as someone who could be teased and it could be funny that James—and Matthew—had ever hung out with. She’d been jealous, jealous because back in Year 9 they had been on the same page with everything it seemed, neck-in-neck for academic awards, and then by Year 11 James had everything and she had nothing.

She should’ve known better, because even if she never admitted her intuition was right out loud, she’d known James was suffering even then. That he’d never let any of it get to his ego, the way she was sure she’d said something about, and every time he accepted an award or anything for years it always looked like he was being forced to be someone else.

“You said—” and James was hyperventilating now, sobbing in the back of the car, and Cordelia rubbed his back, awkward and self-conscious and so, so ashamed, unsure if any comfort was welcome. “You said—and I’d just been dumped, basically, Grace ended the weird kind of summer fling we were having because I wouldn’t have sex with her, so I wasn’t really in the best frame of mind to begin with—you said I was just like any spoilt kid who had everything, and we were nothing alike now. That you’d found your people, and it wasn’t me.”

“I was such a bitch, and a liar, lying because I was jealous, I’m so sorry I ever said that, and that you ever heard that—I don’t even know how to apologise or where to start. You—I understand if you wouldn’t want to be around me. It means nothing, I know, but if I had’ve known you might hear I never would’ve said that,” Cordelia rambled. She understood, in that moment, why people starved themselves and cut their wrists. She wanted to do nothing more than disappear.

“I kissed Grace after that,” James said, only hiccuping a little. The car came to a stop on some street littered with parked cars, and Thomas reached around diagonally to put a hand on his shoulder. Christopher, she noticed, had had his hand on James’ knee this whole time, reaching behind his seat. “I convinced her I was wrong, I was sorry, and she ended up being my New Years kiss but refused to do anything more. Over a few hours she’d figured out she’d only wanted to be with me to look cool, she’d realised, apparently. I respect her for that now, but then, I was devastated.

“The party went on, and I didn’t go home. I snuck off, away from people from school, looking for a bar, a pub, anything that would let my dumb seventeen-year-old ass in. They were all closed but I went to the beach. Made out with a bunch of people, random people. Fell asleep when the sky started to lighten, woke up to the sunrise in my face and thought I’d slept for the whole day, but it was barely an hour—and that’s happened before, but mostly when I’ve been up late doing assignments—and all I knew was that I didn’t want to face my worried parents, didn’t want to face anyone from school, but I had no money and no way of getting anywhere unless I went home and got my car and doubtless saw my parents.”

Cordelia didn’t know if James was going to go on. He’d paused, staring at his hands.

“What you said wasn’t even bad, Daisy, I’m such a wreck, I’m sorry.”

“You’re not,” Christopher spoke up. Cordelia had forgotten he was even there. “You beat yourself up a lot for this, but I remember—I guess while we’re on the topic of overhearing things, I overheard your parents talking to my parents at the party.”

James looked up at him, seemingly shocked out of—out of whatever he was reliving. “Do I want to know what they said?”

“Just that—” Christopher hesitated. Blushed, embarrassed at being questioned by James who he was only just starting to grow close with again, Cordelia guessed, still self-conscious about being the centre of attention, even between the four of them in the car. “They didn’t really say anything bad or damning,” he finally said, as if he only just realised the question James had asked, and then had taken it literally.

James laughed, shaking his head. “Kit, glad to see some things never changed. I do want to know. I’m scared but I’d better face it, and face—whatever the hell you must’ve been thinking this entire time. You didn’t tell anyone else, did you?”

“Not a soul,” Christopher said. “Cordelia will vouch for me, I didn’t even tell her.” He narrowed his eyes. “But maybe I should, brought our heads together to work through our worry and suffering a lot quicker together.” He looked at her apologetically.

“You did the noble thing,” Cordelia said, still knowing—though their connection felt distant now, a little weird, and she wondered if it always had—how to comfort her friend.

“Anyway, they were just saying, that you’d been out a lot, hard at work training for surfing and piano and whatnot, and staying out late with Matthew afterward, just to get up before dawn the next day, and they were worried you weren’t sleeping. Mam made sure to remind Will that at our age he was doing a lot worse, and at least you were channelling your energy into productive things as well as having fun.”

James nodded. “Thanks Kit. I was hypomanic for a while, it seems. We know that now. My memory of it isn’t the best.”

“Typical seventeen-year-old behaviour,” Christopher joked, and he was saying it to make James feel better but Cordelia knew him enough to know that he was referencing the fact that he was the only one there who was still seventeen. Cordelia felt a stab of worry, but he smiled at her and said, “I do sleep sometimes, though. I know we’re all studying a lot, but I think I know the warning signs to watch out for after all of our library research.”

James seemed to be lost in his head, and Thomas, sweet Thomas, picked it up straight away. “You’re worried about Lucie, aren’t you?”

“She has my genetics,” James said.

“One thing at a time, okay?” Thomas said, and Cordelia wondered how many times he’d done this, how long he’d been keeping James calm, whether all this time when she’d barely seen Alastair, Thomas and Matthew and James had still been catching up, and whether it was more often than the couple had gone on double ‘dates’ with her and Christopher.

“Did you two want to finish off your conversation with us here or by yourselves?” Thomas asked. Always perceptive, always supportive. Cordelia had missed seeing him.

James leaned over to hug him. “Daisy and I will talk for a bit, if she wants to.”

Cordelia breathed a sigh of relief. After all that, James still chose her.

“We might not make it out of the car,” she said.

Christopher winked, and started rummaging around in his bag. Cordelia didn’t even question it, Christopher loved getting out random knickknacks, until he pulled out a condom. “Maybe talk first, get out everything you both have to say, but in case the conversation goes well.” He dropped it into James outstretched hand.

Thomas squeezed his shoulder one more time. Then he leaned over and kissed Cordelia on the cheek. “Look after each other, you two,” he said. “you’re much too precious.”

And they did. They would. Fragile, but they’d move on from this, learn to apologise, learn which parties they wanted to go into (or pop in for a little bit, pretending it was a redo of New Years, then go home together) and which ones they wanted to skip. Learn that each other were traumatised, and each other’s bodies were a map of different triggers and delights and getting to know each other meant knowing, and loving, both.

Cordelia could see how relieved James felt whenever he got something off his chest. And she felt it too, apologising, though she wondered if she needed to be more open with him, too.

The relief that James felt when he received his letter of acceptance from the Conservatorium resonated deep into his bones. He opened it with shaking hands at his desk, and woke up, sticky with tears and the stiffness of falling asleep with his head in his own hands sitting up.

He had something to do next year. Something productive, with like-minded people, even though there were still expectations he had to unpack and there was a good chance this wouldn’t be the degree he finished.

What it was, was one step closer to telling his story and escaping his past.

He showed the letter to Cordelia, still fuzzy with a headache from crying his eyes out in relief. (James hadn’t been a crier in years. People said that going on medication for your mental health made you feel numb, but for James, it was the only thing that allowed him not to feel so intensely that he totally dissociated from his own experience and could be somewhat emotionally present).

“I need to get out of here,” he said. “Can we get out of here?”

“Absolutely,” she said, kissing him. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

It wasn’t now, James wanted, as they aimlessly drove through Menai and to Picnic Point, Cordelia’s hands steady on the wheel, as always.

“Can we get out of the Shire for good next year? I’ve gotten into university, you’ll get into yours, and neither of us really want to be commuting to 8am classes from Kurnell.”

“You know I so badly want to,” she said. “That’s my dream for you, to get away, be yourself away from their expectations. Go, walk as far as nobody knows you. I’m so, so glad that you didn’t leave me behind.”

Studying for exams for Cordelia passed like a blur. She went from one textbook to another, studying with her favourite people around her, revising and revising the compulsory subjects (the ones she’d chosen, that was, something she’d signed herself up for) for school, and then for a ‘break’, she looked at books on psychology, told herself it was a headstart for next year. Because she would make it in to her preferred degree. She had to believe that.

In reality it was like something deeply unanswered and confused somewhere inside of her was being satisfied from some sort of desperation the more she learned about the human brain. It was like she could breathe a little easier. Be comfortable with how she felt for James a little easier. Be less angry at and more understanding of her family. Feel a little more hope for her future, even if it was mingled with grief.

She remembered what James had told her, the night of the graduation party. Remembered how he’d shaken with emotion as he confessed his (objectively funny) crimes, and she apologised again and again, for the thoughtless thing she said.

She didn’t know which of them had apologised more that night. But she came away determined that she was going to show James, every day of both of their lives if possible, how much he was loved and absolutely perfect the way he was. She’d eat her own words, and the girls at school would see that. They already did. She deserved to embarrass herself like this.

But the oddest part was, that even when people must’ve got wind that something was going on between the two of them, for that entire year, they had completely left Cordelia alone. It was as if they’d forgotten James, but they’d forgotten her too, even when Matthew left and people knew Cordelia would know where he was—how could they not?—they didn’t ask her questions, didn’t interrogate or tease the way she thought they would. It was like they’d completely moved on.

So she moved on too, focused on nothing but her relationship and passing her exams. Chose to be grateful that James still wanted to be with her. Made sure she communicated how natural it was for her to want to be with him too.

James was scared, he realised. The high of getting into university passed, and he found himself, yet again, sitting at the piano not knowing what to play. Maybe he’d always been scared. Maybe any bravado, any manufactured confidence that seemed to come to him in weeks where he barely slept, barely felt like himself, maybe all of them were lies, acts, just to fill the void inside of him.

He still hadn’t gotten back into writing poetry, not really, all the literature that he used to love was boring for him now. All his music sounded the same. Monotonous. He had days like this, days where nothing quite felt right, and from a young age as much as he hated them he’d known them as part of the creative process. Then he got older, and realised he’d been suffering so much without even knowing that most people didn’t feel like this. Didn’t feel like every day was just annoyance after annoyance, floating around as a facade of himself created based on the reflection everyone else saw of him, something, anything, to hide who he really was.

He was pathetic, worthless, damned to a life of torment. He was told that these things weren’t true whenever he vocalised them. So he usually didn’t. It didn’t matter if he did or not; because the truth would come out at the end.

James was scared that it would break people’s hearts, but he was even more scared of being alone.

The truth will never leave you alone.

He froze up sometimes, when Cordelia wanted to do more than making out, memories of things he wasn’t sure happened popping up, things he was sure he’d never remembered before. A girl at the beach—or was she a hatstand? Flirting, touching him, the image of a policeman’s hat that for some reason he knew that he’d stolen, half covered in sand.

He wasn’t sure he was ready to tell anyone about it yet, but he was acting like he’d been assaulted.

He didn’t want to think about it. He’d climbed something too, something he never would’ve done in his right mind. God knows where he’d gotten a gun. James remembered very little of that night, but one day after too many breakdowns even when he’d asked for her hands on him, he admitted, crying, to Cordelia, that something was wrong, someone had done things to his body that he couldn’t remember, but it had left him scarred, broken, for her.

He was so horny, and yet his body was stopping him, it seemed, from doing anything about it.

Studying ramped up before exams for Cordelia like any good South Asian kid, and with it she grew more anxious, more irritable, catching concern from James or Christopher a handful of memorable times. James sat with her to calm her down, touched her when she needed a distraction, whereas Christopher was better at talking to her to recognise how she was feeling, and why.

Mostly she was just really, really stressed, to the point where it was rubbing off on James and triggering enough of his symptoms that he needed his medications adjusted twice.

Cordelia didn’t know how she survived through her exams. She looked back on them, and barely remembered them, nights of study all blurred into one, blurred into some zombie of herself that made its way to the school hall and sat them.

But what she remembered was James. Everything about him. What he did, how he made her feel.

She could relax now, but her nervous system was still hypervigilant; still waking her up with nightmares: situations it concocted where the dream she had at the start of the year where James had moved away to start a new life for herself were her reality. Where he managed to escape everything that was hurting him, put it in his past and not be so haunted by it as he was now—but in order to do that, he had to cut all contact with Cordelia. She was part of what he needed to escape, despite doing nothing wrong, just by association.

There were so many variations of that dream. He’d asked her to get away, and she’d said no, because of her dad, scared to leave her mother with him. She’d said yes, and things hadn’t worked out, they’d run out of money, dropped out of university, they’d fought.

Then there dreams where she remembered that she did do something wrong, always the same thing, and she had to watch herself saying it again and again, varying levels of intoxication, repeated again and again as James got up to more and more dysfunctional adventures. Back at New Years, or now, or next New Years, chasing after him and watching him flirt with and be touched by other girls and be too confused, too out of his mind to escape when he didn’t like it.

She’d be jealous and confused and then circle back around to feeling guilty for kissing Matthew back in April. She’d apologise but it was never enough, because she was saying sorry to herself, sorry that James had gone through something horrific and it impacted their intimacy together.

And yet he was everything she wanted him to be, vulnerable and emotional and broken in a way that showed he trusted her, showed the effort he put in (unlike her father) to do better, get better, not let the trauma of the past define him.

They were discovering it together, communicating the whole time, James reassuring her that how she was feeling was just as important as him, pleasuring her more often than vice versa. But sometimes she wanted to pleasure him, and it broke her heart and filled her with rage the way that someone—some people even, she wasn’t sure—had taken things from James when he was already out of his mind—he’d vaguely remembered, recently, a suicide attempt to drown on the rocks of the Cronulla headland that night—and she could see the hauntedness in his eyes and the way that he’d always have to live with it.

Cronulla, the more they dug up, was a place of bad memories.

James had been concussed when they finally took him into observation, and borderline hypothermic.

It had been a warm night, but the water was cold, and staying in for long enough with the wrong clothes and deliberately hurting yourself and losing blood from a head wound after all that you’d done—the combined effects of that could add up for anyone.

James’ parents had been devastated—they tried to keep it from him, at first, but the longer he stayed in their house, the more he put the pieces together.

They hadn’t been surprised, though, not really, and that was what cut him up the most. During that summer he’d been out a lot, first to supervise Matthew, then he started doing wilder things on his own.

Always with a story to tell to Lucie, something she would incorporate into one of the books she was writing.

James wondered if Lucie remembered how she used to write for Cordelia as children. How Lucie—with lots of friends, while James had none—would still gatekeep Cordelia as a friend for herself, not for him. Even though they were the same age, and would end up in the same grade at school when she moved to Cronulla. Even though ever since that happened, Cordelia and Lucie barely spoke.

He was ashamed when he looked back on his past behaviour—how could he not be? And yet he had to be honest. He couldn’t deceive Cordelia about what he was capable of.

So he told her, bit by bit, when he could remember, when he felt safe and didn’t completely hate those parts of himself. After therapy, often. He wished he could open up his brain, including things he couldn’t remember, tell her in a more efficient way, get it over with, if something would finally scare her away. But he was—and people around him kept reminding him—allowed to take his time. Something compared to nothing. He was making a habit of honesty, of connecting with himself in a way that he could sustain.

Something was better than nothing, with eating, with tidying and studying and brushing his teeth. It was a foreign concept for him for so long, so long that he’d been in the habit of doing ‘his absolute best’ (aka basically perfect) in everything he did, that when he couldn’t, he felt like he should just not do anything at all. With surfing—and it’d been his past self’s fear of dying on the rocks that had cemented in him that he needed to do that properly—and with eating. When eating became hard he just stopped doing it at all. Maybe that had been the beginning of the end, really, when he thought back on it. When everything became so much that he gave up on his own body, last spring.

Now, getting out of the Shire and its pressures was a tangible possibility, and James kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to go wrong so it wouldn’t happen at all.