The Other World (A Shadowhunters Fanfiction)

Chapter 2: Gone

James had grown up in a world consumed by demons, a world called Anastrofi. A world so empty and horrific that he didn't think, most days, he'd survive to see the next one. Not after Layla had died.

Tessa and Will, his parents, were dead by the time James was three years old. He survived because Magnus Bane took him in, took him to the underground ruins of the Silent City where he and Brother Zachariah, and a number of other Silent Brothers, had taken in every child they found still alive. There, James had been raised by the few remaining Shadowhunters, taught to survive with every resource that could be gathered from the ashes. It was difficult, this survival, with the threat of the Automatons never far. In a world overrun by demons.

And then there had been Layla.

When Brother Zachariah had brought Layla and her brother, Alastair, Layla had been only sixteen years old. James had been just a few months younger than she was, and he was only sixteen himself when he started to fall in love with her. And he was terrified by how quickly he fell.

They learned and trained together as they grew, and James only loved her more. There was a meager library in the Silent City, kept tucked away in the cavern where parabatai ceremonies had once been held, before the Iron Sisters fell and adamas steles were no longer produced. There'd been a time when James and Layla spent hours there, tucked away in corners and reading—sometimes independently, sometimes together.

Sometimes in each other's arms, James whispering the words in her ear as he read them off the page. Speaking in ridiculous voices so she laughed until she cried, or... or reading stories to her so beautiful that they both shed tears over the pages.

James kissed her for the first time just a day before she died.

Mortmain's automatons had found the Silent City. James only survived because Alastair, callous and battle-scarred and fierce, dragged a fighting, crying James away from Layla's body when she was killed. No, no, let me stay with her, let me stay with her, he'd protested. Let me stay with Layla.

She is gone, Alastair had said. So go and fight like hell, brother. Do not die with her today. Live to avenge her.

And it was the rage in James' heart that kept him alive, to this day.

A few survivors had escaped together. Alastair, Brother Zachariah, Thomas Lightwood, Anna and Christopher, Kamala Bridgestock, Charlotte and Henry Fairchild, Jesse Blackthorn, Lucie Herondale, James. When they all finally found a place to hide and settle, after weeks of battling and running, it was in the Shadow Market alongside the faeries and warlocks whom Shadowhunters had once hated.

James had receded into himself for weeks.

Others found solace in their love for one another, or their efforts to continue on planning their war against the automatons. But James felt he would drown in that grief--the fourth in a series of what seemed to be endless losses. He'd lost his parents to this war, and his best friend, and now Layla—who'd brought him the first happiness he'd felt in years. They had not been given time. He might have married her underground, in that Silent City, if they'd lived long enough to come of age. He might have been happy with her, just a little, in that quiet way that happiness breaks in, during those brief bright moments amidst a sea of darkness.

But she'd been ripped away from him before he even had a chance to tell her he loved her.