Never Before || Self-Para (Jace and a WHOLE lot of dead people. Mostly Herondales.)
With a grunt, Jace nearly slammed the door of his not-so-temporary chambers behind him and threw himself onto the bed. He was usually not one to take to such public display of emotion -- counting anger and all-round discomfort to the 'emotion' category -- but the whole 19th century London had really begun taking its toll on him. Granted, he had never been all that happy with their unusual situation to begin with, but with finally starting to get along with the only relative he had ever really known, leaving the time and place was suddenly not all that desirable to him. The minute they left he would return to being out of place; the only piece left in a puzzle most people didn't feel needed any solving. But he did. They had told him all about how his parents had been in the circle and the circumstances of his birth, but those were trivial facts. He was far more interested in the things others had considered trivial; the little details about his biological family he would never know of.
Jace shook his head. It was amusing, really; a little less than a year ago he had been back in New York, devoting his time and attention to things far more important than his own mommy-and-daddy issues. Now, nearly a year later or about two hundred years earlier, he was a mess of common teenage angst and equally irrelevant emotions, out of which the whole plainness of it all bothered him the most. Jace was anything but plain, and it sickened him that he seemed to have lost his touch. Time travel really brought out the worst in him.
He was just beginning to loosen the laces of his boots when a thumping sound caught his attention. Jace looked up, and the thumping stopped. He shrugged. As he resumed his previous engagement, so did the noise, and left a pause long enough for a sigh to slip past Jace's lips before a crashing sound took its place. He stood up and moved towards what was left of the vase that had been standing on his bedside table as he silently cursed. He wasn't particularly surprised by it -- the supernatural occurences around him had been going on for a few days, and he just assumed it was some spirit trapped in the London Institute acting out. So far the paranormal tantrum had cost the Branwells two vases, a teapot and a mirror.
After putting the shards where the vase had stood moments before, Jace sat down on the edge of the bed. But it did not seem as if he would ever be allowed to take off his boots because next thing, he felt the mattress shift slightly underneath him; as if it was giving into a weight on the other side. Now that was new. In one swift motion Jace stood and spun around, now facing the figure that had been sitting across from him on the bed, their backs turned. The figure was that of a woman; something that had been obvious even before she stood and turned around as Jace had, facing him from across the room. She was dressed in a white night gown, thick, fair hair falling across her forehead and down onto her shoulders. Her features were soft, and her eyes... The color was so similar to his own, but not quite. even so he could have sworn they were the same as his. But that wasn't all. The woman was familiar, and it did not take long before Jace understood why -- the reason he recognized her was because he had spent endless nights looking at pictures she was in, desperate to feel some connection.
"Great," he muttered, sure that his time-travel induced state of madness had finally gone one step further. "Now I'm seeing things, too." He tried to think past the fact that he was also talking to himself; the whole who-am-I crisis he was having making him see dead people was bad enough on its own. He knew he wanted answers, only, he didn't know he wanted them that badly.
But she was so... real. Jace knew not to underestimate the powers of the human mind, but surely even his mind couldn't concoct such a vivid image of someone he'd never even met? "Celeste..?" Jace narrowed his eyes slightly, for a second thinking that maybe it was really her. Stranger things had happened. Or maybe, for some reason, he just wanted to believe it badly enough.
She tilted her head slightly, a warm although pain-filled smile spreading across her lips and reaching her eyes. "I never imagined that to be the first thing you would call me," she said, a slight accent in her voice. "But then again..." her voice thickened slightly as she blinked. "I didn't think the first real memory you'd have of me would be when you were already a grown man, either."
For what was probably the first time in his life, Jace was rendered speechless. There was absolutely no way he could have possibly imagined that and yet, there was no way for it to be real, either... was there? The image of her seemed to fade or flicker every few minutes, but apart from that he wouldn't have been able to tell her apart from any actual, live person. Shadows were cast across her features, just as they would have were she in fact alive. She blinked, shifted her weight from one leg to another. She had to be real.
Suddenly her gaze drifted to a point directly above Jace's shoulder. Hinting a shadow, he turned around slightly, and...
"What the--" Jace nearly fell onto the bed as he backed away from the far too familiar man. There was no doubt about it; the blonde man standing in front of him was no other than his father -- the one he knew only from photographs and stories, hardly any more real than Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes up until that point. The man who, in every detail apart from his blue eyes, was Jace's reflection.
Stephen Herondale looked at his son; first, with a mixture of shock and confusion -- mirroring his own expression, Jace suspected -- and then with nearly the same expression as Celeste had. Joy, anticipation, sadness. A certain kind of tiredness written across his features.
"So," Jace said, trying to act as if he was completely unbothered by what was happening, whatever it was. "I don't know what you expected, but I'm not really the 'hugs make everything better' kind of guy."
"They are aware of that," said a third figure in the corner of the room in a slightly stern, female voice. Inquisitor Herondale returned Jace's glance as he turned his head to face her. Her expression was softer than he remembered. Calmer. Unless he was imagining it, he could almost hint the Shadow of a smile on her face. Hers was a face he would never forget, even though it was slightly different now, somehow turned ageless. She was dressed in gear, like Stephen, and her pale blond hair was worn back just as it had been that night on the boat. When she had sacrificed her life for him.
Seeing Imogen Herondale was Jace's breaking point. Slowly, he sat down on the edge of the bed, regarding her with wide eyes. "When you said that, on the boat, I thought you meant..."
"... But I know who you meant now."
