Clockwork Heart | ✓

quattuordecim.

London, 1903

Everyone at breakfast could tell that something overnight had changed between James and Brooklyn.

James saw it in the way Lucie and Cordelia would glance at them and whisper. In the way his mother kept looking at them and looking away. In the way his father would look at them and then his mother as if to silently ask her some question that she was refusing to answer by looking at him. In the way Matthew, his parabatai, kept nudging him and casting him confused looks and looks that promised a long conversation after breakfast.

James and Matthew never had that discussion. Instead, he and Brooklyn spent the day in his room, lying on his bed and reading. She was seated between his legs, her back against his chest, and he leaned against the headboard, his copy of Vathek forgotten and traded in for A Tale of Two Cities while she read his volume of Grimm fairytales that she had picked up from the floor.

At dinner, his father had an announcement. "Magnus Bane sent me a letter today." He announced. "Brooklyn, he found the spell that brought you here. He can send you home."

James's heart ached.

Brooklyn smiled, but it wasn't a happy one. "When can he do it?"

"Tomorrow." He said. "About noon, he said."

"Thank you so much." She said, and she was sincere.

They returned to his room after dinner, and they spent the night--their final night--together. His heart ached the whole time, knowing that Brooklyn, the girl that he had fallen in love with in such a small amount of time, would be gone before sunset tomorrow. Tears had leaked from his eyes when he realized this, and they held each other as they cried.

"Another life," he promised. "I'll find my way back to you in another life and we'll be together. I won't forget you. I love you." He kissed her tearstained cheeks, wiping away the tears.

"And I'll love you just as much," she said, "whether you're a Shadowhunter or a werewolf or a warlock or a vampire or a faerie or a mundane, you'll always be my James. Always."

The pain did not dull, even as he held her in his arms, even as she begged him to smile just once for her, because she could not stand the idea of the last time she could be in his arms being a sad one. It did not dull as she quoted books he had never heard of and never would, because they came from a time in the far future, which he would not live to see. It did not dull as he quoted books and poems, some that she knew and some that she didn't, that he had always hoped to recite to the girl that he loved.

It did not dull. He knew it would not, that it probably never would.

Their tears had dried by the time she fell asleep, wrapped in his arms, her fingers still on his arm where she had been tracing his Marks. His face was stiff with them as he brushed her hair back from her face, as he kissed her cheek, as he whispered words that she would never hear in languages that she didn't know, words confessing everything he didn't have the courage to tell her while she was awake. And when James finally fell asleep, he did so with dreams of love and loss and painful hopelessness in his head.