headcanon time: Jessa have this ongoing bit where Tessa comes up to Jem with funny pick-up lines that random people have used on him and makes him guess its origins. She takes great pleasure in teasing him about it. He pretends to be very normal about it but is secretly flattered because if there is anything he absolutely cannot do, it is withstand Tessa's flirtations.
Obviously, I had to write it. I would like to thank Lily Chen's spirit for holding my hand as I brought this headcanon to life.
PSA: this came to me at 1 am last night during an anxiety attack that was preventing me from falling asleep. by the time I finished writing, my heartbeat had finally slowed down and I fell asleep with ease. everyone say thank you Tessa and Jem. <3 The specific scene takes place sometime in between gotsm and twp. it contains spoilers for the end of tda as well as gotsm! Enough yapping, here we go:
Tessa made her way to the garden where she found Jem dressed in all black – an outfit resembling Shadowhunter gear but not quite the real thing – clearing out the training field that had been set up for Kit. Jem took his role as instructor seriously and was eager to pass on whatever knowledge he possessed to their long-awaited and much cherished Herondale. The matter was becoming all the more pressing the older Kit got and the more inevitable the prospect that he may at some point need to call upon such training to defend his life. Tessa recalled how well Jem, cloaked in silence back then, had helped her son learn how to control his power. That had been over a century ago. The sense of some enormous threat, precisely all the more terrifying in all its vagueness, looming over her children was one she had the misfortune of being all too well acquainted with.
In this moment, however, when the air was clean and the sun was warm on her skin and a gentle breeze blew loose strands of hair out of her face so she had a clear view of her husband, she decided to set her worries aside. Mina was still napping away peacefully in her cot. Kit was taking a shower after his afternoon session with Jem. The sunset cast the world in a golden glow. There was little noise but the chirping of crickets and the rustling of slightly overgrown grass. As she watched her Jem survey the training area, she revelled in the tranquil domesticity of the scene— not counting the pile of stacked weaponry, that is. But then again, it reminded her of an improvised tree that had proven a unique centrepiece of a Christmas party a few lifetimes ago. She felt something soften within her at the memory of another Herondale, this one long-gone but never forgotten, whose grand idea it had been to set it up.
She came up to Jem and laced her arms around him, enveloping him in an embrace from behind. She put her chin on his left shoulder and whispered in his ear, “What’s a beautiful man like yourself doing ‘round these parts?”
Jem’s shoulders shook when he chuckled softly in response. He turned around in her arms.
"This is no place for pretty boys, let alone Nephilim," Tessa continued mercilessly, holding Jem's gaze. "But I suppose I could be persuaded to make an exception, provided that such gesture of good faith does not go unrewarded." She winked.
Jem's head fell back in laughter. “Shadow Market,” he said.
Tessa feigned a stern expression. “Trying to get off easy there, Carstairs?” she teased.
When Jem blinked in response, she melted instantly at the way the fading sunlight made the shadows of his eyelashes dance atop his cheekbones. So she did the next reasonable thing, which was to abandon the bit almost entirely and feather a kiss on his cheek. “One could easily make the case that we have visited more Shadow Markets than the average Downworlder has,” she said. “You will have to be ever so slightly more specific, my dear.”
Jem quirked an eyebrow in mock exasperation, which Tessa knew actually signalled amusement more than anything else. “Venice,” he responded dutifully. “Although I do maintain that warlock was simply trying to charm me into buying some of their wares. They specialized in potions that would grant one the power to read minds, I believe. I have lived with voices in my head for quite a long time, so I politely declined.” He took Tessa’s hands and began playing with her fingers. The corners of his lips curled up in a mischievous smile. “You, however,” he added, “asked so many questions about which favours exactly might grant me unrestricted access to their store and went on to interrogate them which such avid interest about the exact workings of said mind-reading powers that the warlock promptly decided, in the midst of conversation, that it was time to close for the night.”
“I was worried such power might infringe on the privacy of unknowing minds who deserve to have their secrets preserved if they wish them to remain private,” Tessa said. She spoke with nonchalance now, but at the time she had genuinely been quite concerned.
“All in the interest of research and the safety of humankind, of course,” Jem concurred, raising one of Tessa’s hands to his lips. He bent his head to feather a kiss on each of the knuckles of her fingers, slowly, one by one.
Tessa smiled. “Exactly,” she said. “more importantly, however: your guess was correct.” She disentangled her hands from Jem’s and folded her arms around his neck. She shuffled closer, until the tips of their noses were almost touching. “Which surely must not go unrewarded,” she whispered.
Jem said, “It would be a cruelty,” and put his hands on the small of Tessa's back, pressing her up against him.
“When have you ever known me to be cruel,” Tessa murmured against his mouth.
Jem’s response that he knew her to be the most generous, kind and tender-hearted woman to grace this earth with her presence; that her existence alone was a great blessing upon all that lived and breathed there, did not leave his lips. They still had a lifetime of moments together ahead, all of which provided ample opportunity for him to convey such sentiments. For now, he opted to demonstrate his adoration rather than speak it, and leaned into the kiss.
Rules: past is a WIP you stopped working on/finished; present is a WIP you're currently working on; future is a WIP you want to write.
Thanks for the tag, @akiwitch!
Past: A lot of my stuff didn't have titles. Uh, there was this one I started during NaNoWriMo one year about a girl who pretty much couldn't die traveling around with a blue skinned woman and a vampire whose ex tried to kill him at one point. They stopped at a haunted hotel, which tried to kill all of them. I'm not really sure where the plot was going. It was NaNo. I was just letting the characters do whatever.
Present: My Veil Ridge series. I'm currently working on book 5 of it, though at some point I should probably go back through all of them and edit stuff. I'm pretty sure a lot of things still need to be named. Each book is about a different character. Right now, I'm working on Chloe's story in which she has to deal with a lot of cursed objects.
Future: Hm, maybe get back to Brynn's story? I started working on it on the side while writing Chloe's story, but I've kind of put it down for a while now. Brynn's story is pretty much about a girl whose village was suffering from an unknown disease. Bad shit happened. She lost her best friend and parents. She suffered a lot. Now she's traveling around and trying to not get killed by the Royal Hunters. Other than that, I don't know. More stuff with supernatural elements? I've always kind of wanted to do a superhero story though nothing ever stuck.
Rules: Pick a bunch of WIPs and summarize them as badly as possible, then ask your followers to vote on which one they'd be most likely to read. Multiple/all/none options are completely optional. (tagged by open tags from @akiwitch)
Which would you be most likely to read?
girl works to uncover mystery of cursed objects
girl follows friend to abandoned castle and life gets a little messed up
Your words are: wing, glass, sun, book, and promise.
I'll be using the first book of my series, Web of Shadows.
grim
“Well, if we thought this was in any way random, I think that pretty much confirms that something intelligent is controlling the spiders.” Andrew had a grim look in his eyes.
silence
“Yeah,” Kala said, giving the front room a quick glance over, “I can see how this would put a damper on the party.”
After a beat of silence, Andrew snorted a laugh. “Damp. I get it. She’s funny. I’ll go grab some towels.” He walked off down the hall toward the kitchen.
web
One web caught his ankle. With a hard yank, it pulled his leg out from under him, and he landed on his back with a thud, his head cracking against the floor. Three pairs of hands reeled him in, and her black eyes glittered excitedly.
moon
Andrew huffed, tossing one of the chip bags at him. “No one expects movies to actually be realistic. And hey,” he pointed at Gavin, “you never know. You could have run into a werewolf without ever knowing because they just look all human. But under the light of a full moon, you better watch out.”
lies
Gavin turned back to the book. “Uh, it can be deceitful, so you have to be careful of its lies. And the seal trapping it in the house,” he swallowed, his stomach twisting in knots, “can be broken with her blood.” He lifted his gaze to Melanie as a numbness fell over him. “My blood.”
I did this early for an original story when @akiwitch tagged me. But I thought I’d do it for my current WIP fanfic too. So, here are the first and (current) last lines for Within the Silver Web (a LawRusso fanfic).
First Line:
“Here we are,” his mother said with a giant smile on her face. “The end of the line.”
Last Line:
Daniel bounced up onto his knees, turning to fully face him. “That’s awesome!”
Currently working on chapter 52. This really turned into a monster of a fic!
Oh, and tag to anyone interested in participating!
“Whatever ideas you have in your head right now, you can forget about them.” Chris focused back on his laptop, pulling up the document he was working on. “That’s not the way we behave.”
“Says you.” Liz stuck her tongue out at him.
“I say so too.” Alana plucked the phone out of Liz’s hands. “And I think that calls for a bit of punishment. You can have it back when you go up to bed.”
“What? Oh, come on! That’s not fair!” Liz shot up, dragging her legs around so she could turn to face Alana. “I wasn’t even being serious!”
“Could have fooled me.” Alana tucked the phone between the arm and cushion of the couch.
Liz huffed, throwing herself back into the couch. She crossed her arms and glared at the television.
Chris typed for about ten minutes before he cracked and laughed. “I can’t believe we fooled you with that.”
“What?” Liz sat up a bit and turned her frown onto him.
Alana snickered into her chocolates, which only made Chris laugh even more.
“We gotta take a picture!” Kai said, tugging on Chris’s coat. “For Ben!”
“Yeah! Picture! Picture!” Timmy shouted happily.
“Ben?” Alana asked with a curious lift of her eyebrow.
Chris flushed, pointedly ignoring her gaze, as he pulled out his phone. “Just a customer from the bookstore. You should go stand with the snowman.” He opened the camera and pointed his phone toward the snowman, waiting on the little ones to take their places.
