3A/N: A new Valentine & Jocelyn story. I haven't given up on my school-era fic Circle Game, or the much later Odi et Amo, I promise! — this one just sort of insinuated itself in-between and demanded to be written. Consider it a sort of missing link: a glimpse of where the school romance is going — and where the Valentine hunting for Jocelyn in Paris in 2007 is coming from. What a splendid couple those two might have made, if Valentine weren't a maniac... Whether he was insane from the start, or whether Jocelyn's love could possibly have saved him, the way Clary saves Jace, remains an interesting question.
Anyway I had fun with this one. I hope you do too!
Canon: My fics take the original City of Bones trilogy as canon. (For more about why I haven't read the later MI books, see my profile).
As always, everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe of course, but also tone and language and imagery, which I've borrowed shamelessly to try to get closer to the feel of her story. To the extent that I've succeeded, the credit is entirely hers.
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Wednesday's Children
by Midwinter Monday
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The studio was at the top of the house: a wide, airy room with tall dormers let into the slates at regular intervals that flooded the space with light. Long ago, before she was born, it had been a training room, but for decades now — ever since the injury which grounded her father for good — it had lain disused and empty, the ropes gently decaying on the walls, the varnished floorboards dulled by layers of grime. She and Luke played up there occasionally as children; she could remember the way their shouts echoed from the rafters, oddly loud in the silence, and the smeary tracks their feet left in the dust. Even at that age, she'd found something melancholy about the vast, derelict room.
Her mother had always had her own studio in of one of the handsome Georgian outbuildings ranged round the stableyard — she liked to say, with a twinkle in her grey eyes that took the sting from her words, that a little distance between an artist and her family was no bad thing. But Jocelyn couldn't imagine using her mother's studio for her own painting. Anyway, Valentine liked the idea of her painting in the house. He said it cleared his mind just knowing she was there under the same roof. "You're the cornerstone of all that I do, Jocelyn — my inspiration and my refuge," he told her again and again. "You know that."
As for getting away from family, that wasn't an issue, not yet anyway; though she supposed she might reconsider her mother's dictum, if and when — a little flutter of elation and apprehension brushed her nerves at the thought — she bore Valentine a child.
So the defunct training gear had been carted away, the windows cleaned, the walls revived with a fresh coat of paint; leaving her mistress of this ridiculously large and splendid studio.
"I'll have to be insanely good to justify a space, like this," she'd protested. "The next Lucian Freud." But Valentine only laughed, his eyes glowing with love and pride.
"You will be, Duchess. You are."
Which was of course preposterous, even making major allowances for the delusions of a newly-married man in love. Privately, Jocelyn sometimes wondered if she'd even manage fair-to-middling, with so many other calls on her time. Between their regular Shadowhunting duties and their work for the Circle, which was expanding in scope and seriousness by the day, it seemed sometimes like she barely set her hand to a paintbrush from one week to the next — not that her art mattered, not compared with the rest; they both knew that.
But today was that rare gift: a totally — miraculously — empty day. Freshly returned from a dangerous and satisfyingly tricky mission clearing out a nest of Oni demons beneath an East German stadium, they'd be at the bottom of the Clave's duty roster for some days. Valentine had ridden out early this morning to the Glass City for one of his eternal Council meetings: a plenary session on the proposed reorganization of the network of Shadowhunter Institutes 'to reflect changing mundane geopolitical realities'.
"Fiddling while Rome burns," he'd said bitterly. "As if the infernal worlds cared a toss whether the Third World is industrializing, or the Soviet bloc is in decline."
Or no, that was tomorrow's session, wasn't it? Today was the subcommittee to discuss relaxing the wards that barred foreign Downworlders — those who weren't native-born — from entering Idris. "The Working Party for the Destruction of Idris," Valentine had called it with a flash of savage humour, adding that he'd probably be back late.
"Michael asked me to stop by on my way home." He spoke over his shoulder, already pulling on his riding gloves before bending down to collect the thick portfolio of papers, neatly docketed, that lay on the hall table The morning light picked out the long line of his back, the angle of his cheekbones, the wry curve of his mouth as he turned towards her with a half-smile of apology. "You know how he likes to be kept abreast of the Clave's latest follies."
His smile hardened. "Though how any idiocy the Council commits can come as news to him, Angel only knows. Our blind march to destruction under Whitelaw's so-called leadership is entirely predictable. But I promised I'd report back on the proceedings. Tell the kitchens they needn't keep supper for me. I'll get something to eat with Michael."
He'd kissed her, rather longer and more thoroughly than either of them had quite intended, and ridden away while the dew was still heavy on the grass.
So it was particularly frustrating that with an entire day lying sparkling before her like a sunlit reach of sea, her painting was going so infuriatingly badly.
Jocelyn squinted in exasperation at the square of canvas in front of her, as if she could somehow peer through the layers of paint to the picture that was so clear in her head, and so stubbornly eluding her brush. How hard could it be to catch the way the roses dotted the bushes by her parents' mossy sundial like scarlet drops of blood springing through the foliage — or the black, broken shadows the trees scattered like leaf-litter across the lawn? With a stifled noise of frustration, Jocelyn thrust her free hand through her hair, fighting a childish urge to hurl her brush like a throwing knife towards the far end of the room. Killing demons seemed like child's play in comparison.
For an instant, she caught sight of her own scowling face in the gilt mirror propped against the wall, and had to laugh. Valentine would have called it her Displeased Du'sien look.
Perhaps, she thought ruefully, she too worked better when she knew Valentine was only two turns of the manor's curving staircase away — his bright head bent over some esoteric tome on the lectern by the library window, or tilted to one side in the way she loved, black eyes narrowed in concentration as he compounded one of his elaborate concoctions in the laboratory he'd set up in the scullery.
Stretching like a cat to loosen muscles knotted by her long stance at the easel, Jocelyn crossed the room and extracted a paisley shawl from an abandoned still life, throwing it loosely around her shoulders. The September sunshine was warm, but there was a crispness to the air today, reminder that this golden, honeymoon summer was almost over. For a moment, she leaned back against the window embrasure, yielding to the temptation to postpone the battle with the rosebushes and just luxuriate in the silence and sunlight and space.
It really was an absurdly opulent studio. Jocelyn's eye travelled with faintly guilty pleasure down the vast room islanded with artful arrangements of starfish and driftwood, glass bottles and tall spikes of teasel and earthenware bowls heaped with fruit that made her fingers itch to pick up her chalks and start sketching. Her worktable, in contrast, wasn't remotely artful: a working jumble of paint tubes, and striped linen torn into rags and brushes soaking in jars of turpentine whose blue glass glimmered softly in the light from the windows. Still, the effect was strangely pleasing. Behind her, an old set of shelves held the rest of her painting gear, beside a worn chintz sofa of her mother's piled with cushions which Valentine had denounced as too shabby to go on using in the house proper.
The far end of the room was emptier: just sunlit floor and a long blank wall, punctuated by odd-shaped hooks and brackets where armour once hung. When she had a moment, Jocelyn thought she might hang the best of her pictures on them. Below them, a stack of blank canvases were propped invitingly against the wall.
A respectable number of finished paintings too — not as many as she'd have liked to have painted this summer; but then she'd had a lot else on her plate. And if she was perfectly honest — Jocelyn felt herself blushing — her husband was, well...distracting.
All the more reason to get on with the dratted roses now, Jocelyn Morgenstern, she told herself severely, ignoring the little frisson she still got at the sound of her new name. Even after two months, it felt excitingly novel — and at the same time entirely comfortable and right: like the first time you pulled on a new, perfectly-fitting set of gear — or the slender gold band circling her finger, its cool clasp already as familiar as her own hand — or indeed this whole extraordinary and enchanting business of being married.
But that was no excuse for wasting a precious painting day. Straightening briskly, Jocelyn pushed all thoughts of her fascinating husband firmly aside and picked up her brush again.
|o|
To her surprise, the next half hour was unexpectedly productive: roses, sundial and shadows all beginning to fall obligingly into place. She was just contemplating descending to the kitchens in search of a plate of cold meat — from the light slanting across the floorboards, Jocelyn guessed it was long after lunchtime — when she heard the unmistakable clunk of the front door swinging shut on its hinges three floors below, and the creak of distant footsteps starting up the stairs.
Of course, she thought in a burst of belated recollection, it's Wednesday. A man was coming about the chimneys. The parlour fireplace had a stubborn tendency to billow dense, grey smoke when the wind was in the east, and Valentine had declared firmly that he wasn't having his wife smoked like a herring in her own sitting room.
Jocelyn had considered pointing out that that particular chimney had drawn badly for as long as she could remember, before thinking better of it. Valentine's patience for her parents' domestic quirks — taps that moaned, doors that required a special little tug to open, the drain you had to remember to pour a kettle of boiling water down on winter mornings — had always been limited, even in the days when he was only a schoolboy visitor to the house off Angel Square.
The corners of Jocelyn's lips curved, remembering the expression on his face as they'd stepped into her parents' foyer the first time she brought him home, the snow of a blustery December dusk clinging to their cloaks and boots and hair. She'd taken one rapid glance around before hastily throwing down her satchel and bolting up the narrow stairs to the landing where, sure enough, the dodgy catch on the window had come adrift, letting in the blizzard of snowflakes that was swirling gently, picturesquely, down the elegant stairwell.
Valentine had looked startled, then entertained, and then promptly set about helping her brush the snowdrifts off the furniture with his usual cool efficiency. His manners were far too good to betray the slightest astonishment or disapproval — then or on any of the subsequent occasions when he'd been brought face to face with her parents' casual eccentricities. But beneath his graceful amusement, Jocelyn was pretty sure he considered their easygoing attitude to domestic irregularity entirely of a piece with their maddening refusal to take seriously the threat which the Clave's complacency posed to the Nephilim — and the whole world.
He wasn't entirely wrong either, she thought with a flicker of exasperation. Not that her father had any higher an opinion of the appalling Whitelaw than Valentine did. But both her parents seemed to regard the Clave's disastrous policies with a sort of equanimity — or at least resignation — that frankly terrified her at times. If even her clear-headed parents couldn't see that the Nephilim were sleep-walking to catastrophe, what hope was there of getting through to the sclerotic bureaucrats who held the reins of power in the Clave?
Angel only knew she'd done her best to explain it to both of them. They all had, she and Luke and Valentine — how demon invasions were coming thicker and faster with every passing year while the Council frittered its attention on administrative trivia. The Nephilim were staring defeat in the face, maybe not this year or the next, but soon, unless they found some way of increasing their numbers and deploying what forces they had more effectively. And still the Clave clung to its outdated ways, unwilling to entertain the smallest of innovations to save themselves from extinction. Meanwhile, precious manpower — even lives — were being thrown away on the unending task of policing Downworlders: creatures the Council seemed bent — unbelievably — on integrating ever more closely into Nephilim society. As if, thought Jocelyn indignantly, just because we're all part of the same Shadow World, that made us kin rather than natural enemies — or at best parties to an uneasy and provisional truce.
You might as well say that demons were our kind, she thought with a spurt of anger, sloshing more turps into her jar with such force that it nearly splashed it over the rim and down her smock.
Of course she understood the necessity for diplomacy and detente. You couldn't fight all your antagonists at once — and obviously Downworlders were not actually demons. She supposed she could even see how you might come to acquire a kind of appreciation — even liking — for them if you spent your days, as her father did, immersed in the minutiae of Downworlder society. Individual Downworlders, anyway, like the ancient and cultured Italian vampire her father worked with years ago on some scholarly project, who had come to dinner and fascinated Jocelyn as a child with his piercing black eyes and pearly, translucent skin; or the dapper warlock who kept her family supplied, like any well-run Shadowhunter household, with charms and spells as needed.
Valentine himself could see the intellectual lure of her father's studies of these strange creatures and their stranger societies. Despite their profound disagreement over the Downworlder question, Jocelyn thought her father was genuinely disarmed by Valentine's intelligent interest in his recondite researches into Downworld culture. Sometimes they would linger in the dining room over a glass of port long after she and her mother had finished the washing-up and settled at the scrubbed kitchen table for a cozy chat, while Valentine picked her father's brains with exhaustive thoroughness about some recherché aspect of Downworlder life. Coolly pragmatic as Valentine was, his vivid intelligence could still take pleasure in pure academic enquiry, knowledge for its own sake.
Jocelyn often thought what a brilliant scholar he would have made, as brilliant and original as her father — had he not been the extraordinary warrior he was, body and soul. You could no more immure Valentine in a study than you could shut fire up in a jar: it would extinguish him.
Or more likely, she reflected wryly, he'd incinerate the jar to cinders. That brilliant, fiery spirit had to be out in the world, wielding his sword with all his tireless strength against the hosts of darkness, clearing a path through the bureaucratic thickets choking the Clave, blazing bright as a burning beacon to the Nephilim who flocked to his Cause.
The world had never stood more desperately in need of him either, thought Jocelyn soberly. In her mind's eye, she saw again the bloody remains of the sports fans they'd found smeared beneath the bleachers in Bremen. Some of them had been younger than she was. She thought of Nadia Greenwillow, killed last month in a raid on a rogue nest of Bengali vampires which the Clave had kept under surveillance far too long — the first of their cohort to die, apart from poor Elsie Winterbourne, of course.
Not that Jocelyn wasn't ready — they all were — to give her life in the defence of this embattled world and the helpless mundanes who walked its face in blissful ignorance of their danger. It was what they were born for: she had known for as long as she could remember that her life was likely to be glorious but short. That was the privilege of the Nephilim, a gift as great as all the rest bestowed upon them by the Covenant: the Marks they bore, the Mortal Instruments given into their keeping. To sacrifice themselves, so that the world might live.
But not to throw away their lives uselessly. Jocelyn gazed down into the murky depths of her turpentine, anger flooding through her again in a hot tide. If the Bombay Institute had moved earlier against the Night's Children, Nadia would be alive today.
But the directives from the Clave these days were all for the husbanding of resources, for circumspection, temporizing and diplomatic avoidance of confrontation. By the time even the yes-men at the Institute could no longer ignore the bloody depredations taking place under their noses, the vampires knew full well they'd been rumbled, and when the Shadowhunters finally descended — far too few of them — they were met with all the deadly resistance one might have expected.
As if the Nephilim could afford to lose any more of their dwindling number. Jocelyn set the turps jar down on the table with disgusted thump. And still no one but the Circle, it seemed, had the courage to challenge the Clave's calamitous leadership.
It's up to us, she thought with a mixture of exhilaration and fright. The fate of the Nephilim — of every living creature on earth — rested upon her generation. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising she was having trouble concentrating on the rosebushes on her easel or the man servicing the chimneys.
The footsteps had reached the top of the stairs. Booted feet echoed along the uncarpeted floorboards of the hall.
It wasn't the sweep.
Jocelyn swung round with a muffled exclamation of pleasure and surprise, her ill-regulated heart giving a ridiculous little schoolgirl leap inside her chest as if she weren't a sedate, settled, two-months-married woman now — because she would know that hard, purposeful stride anywhere in the world.
Too hard, she amended with a little frown; to anyone else it might not be obvious, but she could tell from the sharp, rapid percussion that Valentine was in a towering fury. The meeting must have gone even worse than he'd expected. No surprise there, Jocelyn thought with a sigh. She wondered if she could persuade him to stop attending these weekly Council sessions. It was obvious he was never going to make any headway against the fools who were industriously steering the Clave onto the rocks, and it just added fresh tinder to the smouldering fire of his rage. But why had the meeting broken up so early? Or — with a sinking of her heart — had Valentine lost his temper and stalked out?
Wiping her paint-stained hands on a rag, she swung herself off her stool — but the heavy panelled door was already swinging open.
Jocelyn stared, her smile of welcome changing to blank astonishment.
Framed in the doorway, two enormous black birds gazed back at her from their perch at either side of her husband's sleek head, silver eyes fixed balefully on her face. The paintbrush slipped from her hand and rolled unregarded under the easel. Jocelyn closed her mouth.
"Ravens?" she heard herself say faintly.
|o|
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Stay tuned...
In the meantime, if you haven't already read them, you might try my other Jocelyn and Valentine fics: the school-era The Circle Game, and Odi et Amo, which takes place just before City of Bones. For a different kind of romance, there's my long Jace and Clary fic, Permanent Marks. Or see my profile for a list of stories from my Jace-and-Valentine story cycle Songs of Innocence.