My Beautiful One (Jonathan Morgenstern Fanfic)

Wishes For The Dead

"How frail the human heart must be—a pool of mirrored thought,"

—Sylvia Plath

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MAY 2008

As beautiful as the ceremony might have been, Jonathan had never had much patience for mundane weddings. Not the vows, not the rings, not the toasts. It was not because he disliked mundane weddings but the amount of time it took for the priest to speak before boiling down to the rings part, where the couple actually got married, was agonizing. And the gesture of exchanging rings seemed a little pointless to Jonathan. As beautiful the gesture was, it didn't always keep people together and faithful, did they? They were merely bands of metal that mundanes created with no powers.

Jonathan sighed, sitting down in one of the chairs in the barn as he watched Jocelyn, who had swapped her elegant wedding dress for a simple white sundress prance from one end of the tent to another to meet and thank guests, all the while with an enthusiastic smile on her face.

He no longer felt the burning hatred he had felt for Jocelyn when he was Sebastian. Instead, all feelings he had ever felt for Jocelyn had been wiped clean, leaving an empty slate. He watched her as a stranger—a person who could have been his mother in a different world. And from the smiles and happiness in her eyes as she embraced Clary, Jonathan knew he wouldn't have minded her as his mother.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Clary slip out of the barn and he decided to follow her. It was better than staying here and watch the emptying barn.

He followed Clary to one of the largest white tents where Jace, Alec and Isabelle stood by a long table lined with bubbling champagne. Jace raised a glass of champagne at Clary before winking and Jonathan couldn't help rolling his eyes.

Isabelle whistled, shooting a look across the tent. Jonathan lazily looked back slightly and he saw a very young girl who looked nineteen in an elegant green dress accompanied by a boy with mussed dark hair and Chinese set dark eyes.

He recognized the boy, somehow, as Brother Zachariah.

Isabelle made a remark about Zachariah that made Jonathan roll his eyes again. Teenage girls.

"Come dance with me," Jace said as his hand circled Clary's wrist. His eyes held so much love for Clary it hurt Jonathan's eyes to look at him.

"There's no music," Clary stated the obvious.

"We don't need it," Jace gave Clary one of his apparent swoon worthy smiles.

"Aaaaand that's our cue to leave." Isabelle muttered before dragging Alec away by the elbow. He made a soft indignant sound but followed his sister anyways.

"Sentimentality gives Isabelle hives," Clary murmured and Jonathan laughed. "But seriously, we can't dance with no music. Everyone will stare at us—"

"Then let's go where they can't see us," Jace said and drew Clary away from the tent.

Jonathan didn't like Jace's chosen words but he followed them anyways.

A little ways from the tent, Jace drew Clary's back against him, his arms wrapping lovingly around her waist before he planted a gentle kiss on the back of her neck. Maybe they were going to dance?

"We could go in the farmhouse? There are bedrooms." Jace suggested and Jonathan felt the urge to bang either his or Jace's head against a tree. He had been right in his earlier assumption.

Clary, the Angel bless her, turned around and firmly poked her overly hormonal, sex crazed teenage boyfriend in the chest. "This is my mother's wedding. We are not going to have sex. At all."