#ghostseeing

↳ give me an au and i will write 5 ideas/headcanons for our muses in that au + @ghostseeing !

LI S T EN I LOVE THIS AU 

so tessa is heartbroken after stephen’s death. not over him in particular ( he was a dick ) but over the end of the herondale line. so she looks to that story catarina told her once, that she also talked about with jem, about tobias herondale and his lost line, out there somewhere in the world. she doesn’t have much to hold on to but that, she needs hope and something to take her mind off her grief, so off she goes. 

it takes her five years to track johnny down, even with magic. man’s good at what he does - hiding -, and it’s been six years since stephen’s death when she finds him. at first she watches from afar, a warlock not unknown in the shadow market, and learns that he has an infant son.

johnny dies — deal gone wrong, he’s a shadowhunter with no training, cannot hold his own against such odds. the baby’s about to get shuffled into the foster system, and tessa tells herself, i can’t let that stand. so she magics up some papers, inserts herself into johnny’s will as a long lost relative which isn’t technically a lie and ends up with infant christopher in her care.

it’s been a long time since she actually had to take care of a baby, but she makes it work. she moves back to london with little christopher, takes to calling him kit because it’s a bit of a mouthful when frequently shouted across an apartment tbh. her heart breaks a little at jem’s face when she shows up with a baby in her arms.

on the paper, he’s christopher gray, and theresa gray is a single mother. she sends him to mundane school and gives him a proper childhood, lets him make friends and celebrates his birthday, glamours herself up to show up at parents-teachers meetings because it won’t do if she barely looks double his age. so there’s that mundane life for both of them.

and then there’s the shadow world. she doesn’t conceal it from him at all, but she does keep him away from the clave, still a little traumatized by the circle era events and generally afraid they’ll take kit away from her because she’s a warlock and they believe a shadowhunter should be raised by shadowhunter. the rest, she does not hide at all. 

she tells him about how she’s a warlock when he’s little but still old enough to understand. at this point magnus, ragnor and catarina are familiar figures in his life. the warding ritual was performed by jem and tessa, as they did for clary, and kit grows up with one foot in the mundane world and one in the shadow world.

tessa is really passionate about mundane life and how much basic things like modern medicine would help shadowhunters if they got that stick out of their butt and used it, so kit’s grown up with those beliefs, would probably clash with full-fledged shadowhunters if they met. 

she uses magic a lot in their everyday life ; used it to animate their favorite books ( lmao tessa gray-raised kit would at least appreciate reading there’s no way around it ) on his bedroom walls as bedtime stories, to patch up his scraped knees and make that one teacher they both hate trip. she tells him a lot of stories of her own, too, of magnus’ shenanigans in peru, that one time ragnor tried his hand at teaching. a tale of clockwork creatures, too, when he’s old enough not to have nightmares about it.

doesn’t neglect the shadowhunter part of him either — there’s a strange kinship beyond the motherly there, because she doesn’t want him to walk into things unprepared should the clave come knocking. so she teaches him demonic and faerie languages, about runes and what he should know about downworld.

he’s around nine or ten when the mortal/dark wars happen ? and tessa’s freaks the heck out. she takes him with her into the spiral labyrinth, and lbr here kit probably befriends some other warlocks along the way.

but also jem ! kit’s met jem before because tessa brought him to blackfriars bridge once he was old enough. probably was scared when he was really little because, you know, silent brothers aren’t exactly reassuring. but it got better over the years, and jem probably cries actually meeting kit for the first time. 

from there they’re a full family ! kit is flower boy at their wedding. teaches jem about modern stuff with ridiculous gusto. jem takes on his weapon training because tessa has the will™ to do it but…does not actually like it that much and isn’t as good at it as jem anyway. they travel a lot because jem has some catching up to do, kit’s sort of used to it because tessa always had them go on nice vacations when he wasn’t in school. they’re so happy i’m crying