10A/N: For last week's kind anonymous reviewer (thank you!): a small scrap from the cutting-room floor. I'm working on my next Jace and Valentine fic, I promise; just painfully slow. Consider this a promissory note...
Like all my postscripts, this one is pure guesswork, a stab at imagining what is happening after the lights have gone up and the storyteller has gone home. But there is a fighting chance that it is true. —MM
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So this is REALLY an outtake, and has no place in this story. But I couldn't resist peeking round the door of Jace's room that long afternoon, as his father sits in his study working through the papers on his desk and thinking of Jocelyn...
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One finds him, I think, lying on his stomach on the floor of his room, playing with snail shells and a marble. Over the years he's collected bucketfuls of shells in all sizes and colours, which he keeps in a wooden box under his bed to use as demons for his toy Shadowhunters. This afternoon, he's laid them out in clusters and is morosely mowing them down with a cloudy grey glass marble he's pretending is a cannonball.
It's so unfair, he can't help thinking, that you can't put runes on anything that goes bang in real life. Cannons are such a better way of wiping out enemies than despatching them laboriously one by one with a blade or an arrow — and so much more fun. But guns won't work on demons, his father says; you can't even use them on Downworlders unless you make the balls and bullets out of silver or cold iron — or he supposes, holy water: he's pretty sure water cannon are mentioned in some mundane book of his father's.
He rolls the marble again and watches a row of pinkish-white Raum demons scatter. He's trying not to think about any of it: his shock and bewilderment, the weight of guilt and misery lying like a stone at the bottom of his stomach, the pain, which is still pretty severe. But his father's face keeps rising up in his mind, the cold anger in his eyes. He wishes he'd never touched the beastly book. He wishes he had managed to keep his vow, and not cried. He doesn't think he acquitted himself very well. He wonders if his father will still be furious in the morning.
At least he won't have to face him till then; it's the only good thing he can think of in any of this. And surely he wasn't imagining it when he thought he saw his father's expression relent a little — at the very end, when he said he was sorry?
Latin tomorrow, his father said. He wonders what Latin is like, whether it will be anything like learning French. But then, he's known French forever, bits and pieces anyway. He can't remember a time when his father didn't tell him his bedtime story in French, and before that there was his nursemaid, Sylvie.
His recollection of her is hazy: her long grey dress and white apron, the thick dark hair neatly coiled on top of her head. She smelt of violets and soap, he remembers, and her hands fluttered about her like birds as she spoke. As far back into infancy as memory will reach, she seems to be there, a vague, fussing presence: to get him up and dress him and give him his egg in the bright, low-ceilinged nursery at the top of the house; to take him out in the gardens to play, or keep him out of mischief indoors if the weather was too horrible even for a Wayland; to bring him to his father in the afternoons — or was it mornings sometimes too? a hazy memory floats up of lying on that Persian carpet in a pool of morning sun, stacking wooden blocks marked with runes while his father works — to see to his supper in the evening, and give him his bath and put him to bed. And talking at him, always tiresomely talking the way nursemaids do — in French.
Until of course she wasn't there anymore. After the time he managed to slip away from her, and fell off the wall of the kitchen garden and broke his collarbone, and Sylvie was sent away. After that his bed was brought down from the nursery, and he got to eat his meals with his father at the long, polished table in the dining room, and learn about demons and fighting and all the fascinating, deadly weapons in the armoury upstairs, and it was just the two of them together, always, for everything...
Anyway, people don't speak Latin, he tells himself impatiently, So it's obviously going to be different, stupid.
He retrieves the marble and shies it savagely into a clump of lumpy black Raveners. The sun has barely moved across the sky; the narrow, barred shadows cast by his iron bedstead lie stubbornly at the same unchanging angle across the wide floorboards. Was there ever an afternoon as long as this one? Wincing, he shifts himself onto hands and knees and clambers over painfully to extract the marble from under a chair. Settling back on his stomach, he takes aim again. A phalanx of poisonous-looking lemon-yellow shells explodes spectacularly, and the marble comes to rest in the far corner of the room. Suddenly it seems too much effort to haul himself up and get it, and he lays his head down on his arms, the backs of his eyes stinging with the tears he refuses to let come. And to his surprise, because it's years since he stopped taking his afternoon nap, he falls deeply and mercifully asleep.
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Cantab
June 2013
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Poor little valiant Jace: my heart bleeds for him. But it is the chronicler's job to tell the story as it happened...
If you liked this story, you might enjoy my other Jace and Valentine stories: Fall 1997, An Orchard So Young in the Bark, Chiaroscuro and Lessons — they're all really leaves out of a single book: the story of Jace's irreplaceable, unforgivable, irreparable childhood with Valentine.
You might also try my Valentine and Jocelyn stories Odi et Amo, Wednesday's Children and The Circle Game — or Permanent Marks, a long Jace-and-Clary fic set just after City of Glass. Like all my stories, it's really all about Valentine...