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On the opposite side of the desk Fray opens her mouth, and Alec knows she is about to try placate him again.
“I…”
She deflates, not finishing whatever vague thing she was going to say. Whatever non-answer she was about to give just like she, and Jace, have been doing time and time again in the weeks since Valentine’s death whenever he’s tried questioning them about whatever it was that had happened at Lake Lyn to make his parabatai rune disappear only to return again by the time he, Magnus and Izzy had managed to make it there.
When she looks up again silent tears are slipping down her face.
“You’re right,” she whispers, shoulders hitching as she cries out the confession. “Jace did die. Valentine killed him.”
Alec represses the urge to say, ‘I knew it’.
“How did he come back,” he asks instead, his voice cracking as it sinks in that he’d really lost Jace.
“Because I made a wish to Raziel,” she says, even more softly. “I had to, I had to,” she continues pleadingly, though Alec hadn’t said anything.
Her words sound muffled, barely audible over the white noise rushing though his ears. Her confession feels like someone has wrapped iron bands around his chest and are squeezing them shut, all the air stolen from his lungs.
“I’m sorry. Alec, I am so sorry,” she continues, and when Alec is able to focus on her instead of the ice flooding through his veins, he sees the way she’s shaking as she apologises, still crying silent tears. “I shouldn’t have kept this from you. I know what position this puts you in with the Clave. So, if you want to send me to the Gard…”
Sending Fray to the Gard means signing her death sentence. And even if Jace wasn’t stupid in love with her, he wouldn’t do it. Because as much as he hates to admit it even to himself, Fray’s not that bad. As a Shadowhunter and as a friend.
And maybe, if she can learn to do things within or with just bending the laws, instead of straight up disregarding them, maybe she could even be a great Shadowhunter.
Standing up, Alec’s surprised his legs don’t buckle under his own weight from the recent shock of learning that his parabatai had actually died. Stepping around his desk, Alec closes the gap between them and wraps his arms gently around Fray’s shoulders. Gentle and barely there at first just in case she wants to not be touched, but after a second she seems to register his touch and sinks into him. Her hands coming up to fist in his shirt as she clings to him; her face pressed into his chest and her tears soaking into his shirt.
Alec tightens his hold on her, hugging Fray the way he would Izzy. Widening his stance enough to rest his chin in her hair as they both shake in grief and relief. “I would have done the same thing,” Alec admits in the near quiet of his office. And Clary must hear it because she finally stops mumbling apologies.
The tears Alec hadn’t realised he’s been shedding dry up faster than Clary’s and in the time it takes for her to stop shaking in his arms, Alec comes up with a tentative plan.
When Clary finally unwraps her arms from where they’d snaked around his waist and steps back to wipe at her face, Alec lets her go and crosses the room to rune the door locked. Returning to her side so that he can lead her to the sofa sitting along one wall of his office, draping the knitted throw he keeps for naps over her shoulders before crouching at her feet.
“Clary,” he says, waiting until she looks him in the eye and he’s sure he has her full and undivided attention. “I need you to swear to me that you haven’t told anyone else about this.”
“Jace knows,” she says, and Alec breathes a sigh of relief. “I had to tell him. But we have to tell someone. He doesn’t remember things, Alec. He won’t remember hours at a time; where he’s been or how he got somewhere. And I don’t believe him when he says it’s just exhaustion. What little sleep he does have is riddled with nightmares of Jonathan and him killing me, and he’s convinced they mean that Jonathan’s the Owl.”
Alec has no doubt that whatever little of this that Jace has actually admitted to Clary and isn’t just her own observations were spoken in confidence and that Jace would hate that they were talking about him behind his back; but Alec knows that, along with Izzy, there isn’t a person alive or dead that cares more about Jace than himself and Clary.
Alec puts the somewhat new information about Jace aside for the moment. Right now, the most important this is keeping this contained. “No. Clary, listen to me. No one can know. Not even Izzy. This stays between you, me and Jace for now. Telling anyone will land you under the Clave’s attention and…”
“I don’t care!” Clary bursts out, it’s the loudest thing she’s said so far and underneath the surface deep fear on her face, Alec sees the truth of that statement. She truly doesn’t fear the fate that awaits her if anyone finds out what she’d done.
“They will kill you,” Alec says slowly, keeping eye contact to make sure it sinks in. “If the Clave finds out you used the Wish, they wont just lock you up and they won’t just derune and exile you. They will kill you and no one will stand in their way when they do.”
“Then what?” Clary asks, almost pitifully, her eyes glassy with tears again. “What do we do?”
Hours later, standing in the heart of the Silent City, Alec lets Clary worm her way under his arm, holding her close as they wait outside the room that Jace is in along with Magnus and Brother Zachariah.
“What are we going to tell people?” Clary asks, breaking the silence they’ve been standing in since Jace and Magnus first disappeared inside with Brother Zachariah.
It’s a fair question and thinking over a possible explanation that would get them all off any potential charges and not reveal the truth is all that’s been keeping Alec from absolutely losing it.
“If, and only if it comes out; then we say that Jace died and some combination of our bond and both your blood were enough to anchor Jace just enough for your runes to bring him back.” It’s the best Alec’s been able to come up with and he’s hopeful it will be enough.
It’s old news, to Shadowhunters anyway, that he and Jace share an almost unnaturally deep bond. Though they hadn’t known it at the time, there were whispers in the months after they’d first runed each other as they’d fought and trained to control it that the Clave had considered ordering their bond broken for their own safety. Better two broken Shadowhunters than two dead ones.
And no one really knows the extent of what the extra angel blood Valentine had experimented on either Jace or Clary with allows them to do.
“And what about why I didn’t tell anyone?”
That part of Alec’s plan is a little sketchier, but he knows the absurd things some Shadowhunters believe of mundanes and the equally absurd things some Downworlders believe of Shadowhunters, so he thinks it’ll work.
“Tell them you were scared of the consequences of bringing someone back to life like that. That you are scared people might try to exploit it. Give them horror stories from mundane movies, all that nonsense about bad things that happen when you resurrect someone.”
“You really thing that’ll work?” Clary asks, her scepticism clear in her voice.
Alec doesn’t voice his doubts. “Just pray it doesn’t come out, okay, Fray.”
“You trust Brother Zachariah?”
“Magnus trusts him,” Alec himself has only me the Silent Brother a few times in his life and all but the last was through Magnus. “Besides, Silent Brothers aren’t loyal to the Clave so much as they are to Shadowhunters.”
“And he conducted our parabatai ceremony. He was one of the few that argued in our favour when the Clave thought it would be safer to cut our runes when we were first bonded,” Alec adds. Its calming his worry about Jace to talk about this, the words coming surprisingly easy. “He was Jace’s great-great-great-grandfather’s parabatai,” that has been a surprise to hear once they’d found out for certain about Jace’s heritage. “He… has a fondness for Herondales, if anything does come out it won’t be him.”