#gracetopher week

The moment came to an end. The sky returned to normal, the sounds of the city and the aftermath of a battle returned. The doors to Westminster Abbey were thrown open, and the members of the Clave rushed in with a distressed clamor.

Grace exchanged dazed looks with Lucie. Jesse came over and touched her shoulder; there was a moment where he hesitated, and Grace didn’t know what to make of it.

They were swiftly bundled up by parents and aunts and uncles and brought back to the Institute. James especially was transported with care, Cordelia’s hand firmly clasped in his and Matthew trailing resolutely behind. It made Grace’s chest twinge.

Now, back in a packed Institute, Grace stands alone. Some of her friends – can she really call them friends, she wonders? Now that they are no longer bound by a bigger fight? – like Ari and Lucie take some steps toward her, but they’re intercepted by adults eager to check on them and ask a million questions. Jesse is in a cluster with Thomas, Alastair, and Thomas’ parents. Grace knows Gideon and Sophie are Jesse’s family. Technically, they should be hers too, but she has a feeling they won’t see it that way. And truthfully, the Blackthorn name hasn’t hung right on her for a long time now.

Feeling out of place and uncomfortable, Grace slips away. She has no idea where she’ll go now; with James’ parents back and likely to learn the truth of what she did to him, they probably won’t want her to stay at the Institute. Jesse might attempt to vouch for her, but she couldn’t say she was especially confident in that these days, no matter how well they worked together while London was under Belial’s control.

Until she’s kicked out, though, she has a room she can escape to. The raucous bustle of everyone downstairs gets quieter with each step she takes, though there’s a moment when the volume seems to pitch even higher, Shadowhunters yelling and crying out. It catches her, makes her freeze in place until she realizes they are sounds of joy rather than fear or pain. It truly is over this time, it seems.

Grace shuts her door firmly behind herself and leans back against it. There’s an emptiness in her chest that, while she’s always felt its existence, is sharper now. More prominent. She supposes it doesn’t take a genius to see why.

The war is over. Good prevailed over evil, and now the rebuilding can begin. But while others might see hope in the future, Grace still sees shadows that have yet to solidify into anything real. Her mother – as much of a mother as Tatiana was – is gone. She has no other family save Jesse, and he’s already made more headway in building a proper life for himself than she has. She’s barely had any training, most of the Enclave hates her, and the one true friend she seemed to gain, the one person who practically offered her a future, is dead.

A sob bubbles up in Grace’s chest at the thought of Christopher. She presses her shaking hand to her mouth, trying and failing to suppress it.

“Ave atque vale, Christopher,” she whispers to herself. She barely knows the Shadowhunter traditions, but she knows that much. And she knows he was robbed of the chance to be properly mourned, what with everything else that had been going on. He deserved so much more than he had been given.

Sometime later, after Grace moved to her bed, a knock on the door makes her sit up. She expects it’s Jesse, come to check on her and possibly offer some food. He’d been very vigilant at getting her to eat when she was working on the fire messages, and that habit likely isn’t going to go away.

She stands on unsteady feet and crosses to the door. When she opens it, though, she’s met with lavender eyes instead of green.

Christopher offers her a bright, crooked grin. “Hullo, Grace.”

Grace thinks that if she hadn’t grown up in a literal house of nightmares, she might scream. Because while Christopher isn’t a nightmare – could never be that – it isn’t right for him to be standing there before her. And she checks – he is standing, and not floating like a ghost. He looks as solid as ever, as solid as Grace herself.

(She checks that too, glancing at her hands and down at her torn, stained dress.)

“You’re -” she says, and stops. Her eyes are filling with tears, and her breaths come in rapid pants. It seems her body has caught up with what her mind cannot process, not yet.

Christopher seems unbothered by her inability to speak, though somewhat alarmed by the sudden appearance of tears. “I know it’s a shock,” he says. “I think I gave everyone the worst fright downstairs when I walked in. Anna held me so tight she might’ve bruised my ribs, and Tom nearly fainted. I know that I went away for a while, but I must say, I didn’t really expect that kind of reception upon my –”

Grace cuts him off by throwing her arms around him and pressing her face to his neck. Christopher sputters a moment in surprise before quieting and pulling her close, arms snug around her waist.

“I’m sorry,” he says, softly. “Jesse warned me that you might be startled by my appearance, but – I wanted to see you.”

Grace only hugs him tighter. A thousand emotions are racing through her right now: Disbelief, joy, grief. It is hard to reconcile the memory of his death, still so fresh, with him standing before her, once again flesh and blood.

“Are,” Christopher tentatively says. “Are you going to say anything?”

Grace takes a deep breath and pulls back only enough to properly look at him. At his spectacles, already sitting crooked on his nose, and his surprisingly delicate features.

“I missed you more than I can say,” she confesses.

Christopher smiles then, and Grace thinks she’s never seen anything quite so beautiful.

“I missed you too,” he says. “I think. It’s hard to say what happened after – well.”

Grace knows this isn’t the end of it all. Regardless of how he is now, Christopher died, and that can’t be easy for someone to come to terms with. Even now, with a sweet smile on his face, she senses some unease within him.

But that’s when Grace makes a vow to herself. As long as he wants her around, she silently vows to help him get through whatever demons he now faces (this includes the literal ones, she decides; Jesse can start her training again). He won’t have to face anything alone.

“Christopher?”

He hasn’t let go of her yet, and vice versa. She won’t be the first to pull away, propriety be damned.

“Yes, Grace?”

“If I offered my services to your lab, as a partner of sorts, what would you say?”

For a moment, that unease fades in Christopher as he lights up, his eyes shining with happiness.

When he had recovered, Christopher stepped towards the door, crossing in front of the window as he did so. As soon as the first ray of sunshine hit his skin, he yelped in pain and slinked back into the shadows of the small room. He held up his hand to see the blisters that had blossomed on the portion of skin that had been exposed to the light.

What in the angel’s name had happened to him?

Well, logically, he could put the pieces together in his mind, but what he failed to figure out was how such a thing had happened. And, quite honestly, he didn’t know what to do now.

Normally, one in his position was to turn to another of his kind for help. But, since all the downworlders were frozen in place—all but him, notably— that course of action was impossible.

A silent brother could help him, Christopher thought, before he remembered that they were all in Idris, and surely he couldn’t go there anymore.

So he did the only thing he could do: he waited until nightfall, hoping nobody would see him lurking around in the institute, and as soon as the sun dipped behind the horizon, Christopher snuck out and rushed to the lab at his aunt Charlotte’s house.

He arrived in record time, and he was halfway down the cobblestone stairs when he heard a soft voice echo off of the walls, unmistakable to his keen ears.

“…and I only wish I could have told you—that I care about you, Christopher. And I did not think that kind of feeling to be real. I thought it was a conceit of novels and plays, that one could… could want the happiness of another beyond even their own, beyond anything else. I wish I had understood it more when you were… when you were still alive.”

It was the kind of thing that normally would have made his heart seize, and it made him acutely aware that his heart wasn’t beating at all. He wasn’t breathing, either. How had he not realized until now?

“So if you are here,” said Grace, breaking him from his thoughts, “please. I’m so close, with the fire-messages. I’ve gone beyond where you were, but I haven’t found the solution yet. I need your help. The world needs your help. Please.”

He rushed down the remaining stairs and closed the distance between them, lightly putting a hand on her shoulder. “Grace,” he said, wincing at how hoarse his voice was.

He heard her breath catch as she turned around, her eyes wide as she stared at him. “Christopher? How are you—“

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, offering her what he hoped to be a comforting grin. “You invented ever-burning Valium, Grace! Well done!”

She nodded, but her delicate features were twisted in some sort of unpleasant emotion that Christopher couldn’t quite place. She was staring at his mouth, he realized, and he became painstakingly aware of the sharp fangs that had protruded from his teeth.

He closed his mouth at once, but her gaze never faltered from him. “A vampire,” she muttered. “How curious.”

Christopher forced himself to turn away from her and towards the desk. “So. The fire messages.”

Grace cleared her throat, seemingly broken from her reverie. “Yes. Do you have any ideas?”

“Do you?”

“Well, you’re the scientist, aren’t you?”

“And you think that you aren’t?” He made a sweeping gesture in the direction of all of the scattered papers. “Look at what you’ve accomplished, Grace. You have gotten so much farther than I ever could. You only need to believe that you can solve it. And you can. You are a natural scientist, and a solver of puzzles. All you have to do is silence the voice in your head that says you aren’t good enough, that you don’t know enough.”

While he spoke, Grace had begun to rummage through the notes, carefully examining each page as if trying to find the missing piece of the puzzle in her hands. She stopped abruptly, turning to Christopher with a new light in her eyes. “It’s not the runes. It’s not the chemicals, either. It’s the steles.”

“It makes sense. As they are now, the steles themselves are unable to perform the task we need.”

“But if we added a communication rune, they could.”

Christopher grinned. “See? I knew you could do it.”

But his smile faded as a new wave of nausea crashed over him, his vision blurring as he struggled to maintain his balance. He reached out for something, anything, and Grace caught him, leading him to a chair.

“How long has it been since you woke up?” She asked, her eyebrows furrowed in something akin to concern.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Six hours, perhaps?”

“Have you had any… er…. sustenance?”

“No. I’m still trying to figure out what to do, in that department.” He didn’t tell her how desperately he needed something to ease the constant burning in his throat, how he had grown physically weaker with every passing minute that he denied himself, how his head felt as though it had been pumped full of helium.

She must have known, somehow, because she wordlessly offered him her wrist, giving him a slight nod. An invitation.

And as much as every part of his body wanted him to jump at the opportunity while he had the chance, he forced himself to take a step away from her, shaking his head. He wouldn’t let himself take advantage of her like that, he told himself, no matter how desperate he was. He wouldn’t hurt her.

“Grace, no, I couldn’t possibly—“

“Well, you’ll die if you don’t, and I won’t let that happen. Not after I just got you back.”

Christopher knew that he should have protested again, but he also knew that she was right. He was becoming weaker and more lightheaded by the moment, and here she was, offering him the cure to all of his ailments. Who was he to deny her?

“You can take as much as you need,” she said, and that was the only invitation Christopher needed.

As gently as he could, he took hold of her arm and lifted the pale skin of her forearm to his mouth, sinking his teeth into her flesh and drinking.

He faintly registered a light cry of pain as the relief washed over his body. He pushed himself away from her as soon as his nausea subsided, unwilling to take more than the absolute bare minimum. He averted his gave from her, unwilling to look her in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She shrugged, moving past him to grab a handkerchief. She pressed it to the new found to stop the bleeding “It’s fine. It barely even hurt. Vampire saliva acts as an anesthetic, remember?”

“I’m still drinking your blood. Which, might I add, is a whole issue in and of itself. I should be dead. Logistically speaking, I shouldn’t even be a vampire, and yet somehow, I am. I don’t understand it. I never went through a fledgling phase, I was never buried, but still, for all intents and purposes, I’ve become a vampire.”

“Maybe it was the poison that triggered the transformation.”

“But that wouldn’t have made me a fully-fledged vampire. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t need to. Not everything has an answer, you know.”

“That’s because no one has found one, yet.

“Then we’ll find one,” said Grace. “Look, I understand your curiosity, and your need to have all the answers, and it’s admirable, but right now, the sun is about to rise. You probably ought to go, so you’re not trapped here until sunset.”

“Well, I don’t exactly have anywhere to go.”

“What about the Hell Ruelle? At least until all the downworlders aren’t frozen anymore, you can stay there undetected.” She paused. “Wait, how aren’t you frozen? If you’re a vampire now—“

“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “I don’t— I don’t know much of anything, anymore.” He stopped, forcing a smile onto his face. “But, hey, at least we got the fire messages issue solved, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Have a good night, Grace. Or, er, a good morning.”

“You should come back tonight,” said Grace. “So that we can finish the fire-messages, I mean.”

Christopher smiled. “I’ll see you then.”

—

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