AN: This is actually an excerpt from a longer work that includes far too much sex for the post guidelines at FF but it can be found by following the links in my profile if you want the sexier version (the entire thing is called First Three Days and this is actually its Chapter 7 - which is why this doesn't actually explain why they've got the violin with them and need to stop to drop it off someplace safe)

A second note: I am going to upload these posts backwards so this in now Chapter 1 though it is the most recent addition to this story.

Traffic and Airports

Set soon after their reunion, Jem and Tessa take a plane ride

They didn't go back to London. On the drive back into the city center, trapped in a snarl of London traffic, Tessa had turned to him with an invitation in her eyes. It wasn't sex but the look wasn't far off from the way she looked at him when she suggested something that involved taking their clothing off. A little challenging, a little mischievous.

"The car rental has a drop off point at Heathrow," she said.

"That's miles from your apartment," he said.

"And yet, very close to the airplanes," she said.

"You want to go to Thailand right now?" he asked.

"Not necessarily. I want to go see what they've got on offer," she said. "Last minute seats are often sold very cheap. If you didn't care where you ended up you could go anywhere. We'll need to forge you a passport but that isn't hard."

"You want to go and get on a plane?" he asked.

"Any plane," she had been looking at him with her head tilted back against the headrest but the traffic was moving again and she turned her attention back to the road. "We'll need to take the next exit. You've got about three hours to decide if the cars keep on at this pace."

"Let's go. Anywhere and everywhere," he said grinning as the exasperation climbed into her voice. He waited until they stopped again and then grabbed a fistful of her sweater and pulled her towards him and kissed her temple. She laughed and he released her as the brake lights let up again and the traffic crawled forward.

His world had been so small for so long and suddenly everything he'd never seen was laid out at his feet. They could go anywhere. Anywhere. They could see cities that he had been to countless times but had never truly seen. They could go sit in the middle of the rain forest if they wanted to. They could eat food they'd never seen and learn how to ask for directions in languages they didn't speak. Anywhere and everywhere was a very big place.

"Will you come back to Shanghai with me?" he asked.

"I will but it's different," she said.

"I know," he said. "I want to go to LA as well, before we go too far."

"I've got a house there," she said. "I got it back in the 80s before the Circle but until the uprising it was where I spent most of my time. The Blackthorns have those two half-faerie children and I didn't want them to have no one there to help if the Circle decided to come after them. They never made it that far across the continent but I worried for a long time."

"You heard what happened?" he asked.

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel as they inched forward again. She nodded but didn't say anything else. She wasn't close to many of her descendants but Jem knew she could draw the entire family tree without missing a single distant great-great-great anything. He suspected she could do most of the Fairchild and Lightwood family trees as well. He knew that he could.

"Have you met Jace yet?" he asked. They'd talked through the story, what he knew, what she did. She'd fought at Brocelind but hadn't known all the details that had happened behind the scenes. Jem knew most of it.

"Magnus tried to introduce him in Alicante after the war with Valentine was finally done. He looks so much like his father," she said and her voice wasn't happy.

"He's a hundred times the man his father is," Jem said. "You should meet him. He'll do the Herondale name proud. He already has."

"I thought he was a Lightwood," she said with a little smile that told Jem that she had paid much more attention to Jace than she was letting on.

Most of the younger members of her family had never met her. Even so, sometimes after being told by a librarian in Alicante that the book they were looking for was impossible to find, it would show up on their doorstep without a note. Others had found that their over mortgaged house had been paid off by an unnamed investor. He'd once heard one of the Blackthorns say that they'd been accepted to a difficult training program because of the excellent recommendation they'd received though they had no idea who might be recommending them. She kept her ears open and paid attention to the details.

"He can be both," Jem said. "They're his family." He left unspoken the "but so are we," he wanted to add to that. Tessa smiled at him again and he hoped that it was because she understood it.

Tessa stopped at a bank before they got to the airport and they rented a safety deposit box that they could leave the box of Will's things in without worrying about them. The banker had responded to the name Tessa Herondale with such an excessive display of politeness that Jem wanted to lean over and look at the screen to see how much money she actually had. Even with their jeans and his scarred face, they were treated the way a clerk might have treated a gentleman when the world had been younger. It was surprisingly unmodern.

Jem considered the violin. He held the case in both hands as he had when he'd carried it from Shanghai to Alicante and then from Alicante to London. He didn't want to leave it in the sterile little metal box.

Irrationally, he didn't want to leave it alone. It was made of wood but if something was yours long enough it started to absorb just a little bit of your soul. Didn't Tessa's magic prove that? The violin wasn't just a thing. The banker had left them alone with the box to pack it. They stood in an empty room and she stood beside him and waited for him to come to a decision.

"I haven't even played it yet," he said.

"We don't need to leave today. We can take it to a restorer and get it reoiled and strung and whatever else it needs. You can bring it with you. We can go to Vienna and or Italy and get it done by a grand master of some sort," she said.

"We'll come back for it," he said. "Before Thailand. We'll go wherever the airplane will take us and see everything we can and we'll come back for it."

In the airport, Jem found himself reaching for senses he didn't have anymore. It was easier to be in a crowd as a Silent Brother because he had never been a part of it. Even a gathering of Silent Brothers was not truly a crowd. Each was distinct and unconnected. Tessa had left him with the passport she'd conjured up for him and their tiny amount of luggage to go and negotiate with the person at the ticket counter.

The airport was substantially more complex than anything he could remember about ports or train stations. He'd traveled as a Brother for so long. He hadn't needed tickets or schedules or security checks. He had just gone where he was told.

Tessa was not just buying the ticket but choosing the location. He would go where he was told this time with none of the lingering annoyance of being just a cog in a machine. It had always been there, in the back of his so-strange Silent Brother mind that he had no choices. He'd made the choice that erased all others. The part of him who had never stopped being James Carstairs had also never really accepted that.

"Let's have cake before we get on the plane," he said pointing out a little bake shop when Tessa came back with papers in hand.

She gave him a bemused look, "Any reason?"

"Because there's no one to tell us not to," he said.

Tessa had glamoured their way through security claiming that it he did not really want the entire airport experience. Then, over cake - hers was lemon and his chocolate - she showed him the ticket and explained what the codes meant. They were going to Nice in the south of France. A short flight, they'd be there before dinner.

"Travel is so much waiting," he said later as they stood in a line with their documents in hand. He leaned his cheek against her hair then immediately pulled back. They were in a line. They were surrounded by people and he'd managed to forget it.

She put her arm through his and cuddled against him, "Anybody says anything, I'll curse them."

He put his cheek back against her hair, "You've never laid a curse in your life."

"True, but I'd do it for you," she said.

She stayed close until they got to the gate and eventually through to their seats. She pushed him into the little pair of seats first so he was sitting against the window. It was a small plane. He knew that but he'd never seen the interior of any plane so he wasn't sure what a big one would look like.

He'd been expecting it to be grander. It was a flying machine after all. Shouldn't that be impressive? But it was remarkably like the public compartments on a train. The seats weren't particularly comfortable and they seemed to have been designed with someone much shorter than he was in mind. The little window showed tarmac and little vehicles tugging carts to and fro.

"Impressed yet?" she asked.

"Not really, no," he said returning her teasing smile.

Take off was impressive.

It pushed him back against the seat. Tessa took his hand while they both pretended he wasn't fighting down some instinctual fear that ran deeper than the logic that told him people did this daily and survived. Once the plane was in the air, level and traveling at a consistent speed his fear started to morph into something almost gleeful.

"How high are we?" he asked her.

"I have no idea," she admitted, "I think the captain told us during that garbled message about seat belts."

He looked down at clouds and had a moment of vertigo before it swept away by wonder. Tessa leaned close enough that her shoulder was pressed to his and their hands were still joined. She was watching him, not the window. The sky had been gray and overcast when they'd boarded but from above it was all blue and a spun sugar white.

"Tell me you have not gotten used to this," he said as the clouds broke and they could see countryside laid out below them like an uneven patchwork quilt. She shook her head and he only glanced at her a moment before he went back to watching the world below them. Even when it got monotonous and he had no idea which country they were passing over, he didn't look away. He asked Tessa questions about air travel and where she'd been and how she chose whether to fly or to use a portal and she answered him in a soft voice, still leaning close. The plane wasn't private or intimate but it felt like it in that moment.

When they crossed the Alps, he had another moment of dizzying vertigo. The mountains spread out like a jagged carpet. They were tall enough that people could spend days walking up them, big enough that people could get lost and die on those peaks. They looked like toys from the plane's window. He relinked his fingers with Tessa's but didn't look away. He watched mountains roll by below until they disappeared below clouds again.

"We're very small. People, I mean. We're very small," he whispered to her in Mandarin before the plane began its descent.

"We're not really, the world is big but we contain as much inside us as there is around us," she told him.

He came up behind her and looped his arms around her. Another hotel room. He was starting to conjure of fantasies of a place that was theirs. A home, not just a bed and a table. He wanted to choose wallpaper and help her put up bookshelves and have a wall full of photos of people they loved. He'd seen a photo collection that covered an entire hallway once when he'd gone to see an elderly lady on her death bed. He'd walked below the smiling faces of her family as he came to give her the last rites of the Nephilim before her family said their good byes. He wanted a collection like that.

She cuddled back against his chest and he breathed in the smell of her hair. He had lived for more than a century without her and in only a little more than a week she had become essential. There was no where else he wanted to be. No where else he could even imagine being. Everything narrowed down to her.

"I'm sorry for my behaviour in the station," he said and then corrected, "airport."

"Are you alright?" she asked. "I've never seen you react like that."

"I'm still not very good at having all my emotions," he said. Her hands where over his and he opened his fingers to allow hers to lace them together. He spoke into her neck, trying to keep another overreaction at bay. He was ashamed and he didn't want that feeling to take him over either. "As a Silent Brother they were distant. I didn't have to learn to control my anger or," he nuzzled her neck, "manage lustful thoughts," she laughed. It worked that feeling pushing its way up through all the others to take up residence in his thoughts. He didn't want to be angry or ashamed or sad. He wanted to lose himself in loving her.

"And you've forgotten how," she said.

"I can manage the little ones," he said. "I can manage inconveniences and most of my worries. Usually. Sometimes my worries get the better of me. Sometimes I wait days to do what I should have the first time I saw you."

She squeezed his hands a little tighter but didn't interrupt him. She was filling up all the empty spaces. The spaces in his heart and his head where the emotions would rattle around until they became hurricanes of anger or fear. It was so much better to fill them with love.

"I love you," he said, "I love you and I have missed you for so long. I've worried about you Tessa. Each time news of a terrible story filtered its way down to the Silent City I imagined something like that happening to you with no one to protect you. Shush," he said before she could interrupt him, "I know very well that you can take care of yourself. My anxieties didn't care. After Will," he waited a moment but the grief just tugged at the edges it didn't pull him under, "After Will was gone," it tugged harder but he kept speaking, "I worried about you. When that man in the airport touched you it all came back. My reasoning couldn't get out ahead of the emotions. I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to apologize for," she said.

"I came rather close to breaking his arm," Jem said.

"If you hadn't have been there, I probably would have broken his fingers pulling them off of me. I might have broken his jaw if he'd gotten any closer," she said. "He doesn't know it it but he's actually very lucky."

Jem laughed and the last of the shame evaporated. The grief was still there, tugging at his heart but it always was. Tessa leaned her head back against his shoulder and looked at him.

"It's wonderful to have you there to protect me," she said.

"Even if you don't need it?" he asked.

"Especially because I don't need it. People protect the defenseless out of honour. You don't need to protect me, you do it because you care," she said. "I'd do the same for you, if you ever needed it."

"You protect me from all the things that I can't fight. I think that matters even more," he said and turned her to kiss her deeply.