#(cutting myself off or else this post will show up in the (ir)relevant tag </3 probably </3)

[ria-starstruck]

not posting this on artfight until i get roxanne's ref done but yippeee petra here she is

[jcmorgenstern]

"#hey where's the fic where chaotic bisexuals jace and clary are in a relationship with clary's estranged brother's foster mom#literally lease my crops are DYING i NEED cougar lilith i NEED#(mundane AU 20k rated M or E) #im gonna have to write it myself arent i" // perhaps Lilith is beside herself over Jonathan leaving, and this is a chance to feel closer to him through people important to him. perhaps I love this idea.

tags from this post (thank you anon!!! i went a little fucking crazy and wrote this which is entirely unedited.....rip in pieces)

It had been a year and a half since she had seen Jonathan last. He had been hers in all the ways that mattered (but never flesh and blood) until he wasn’t, a stabilizing weight by her side cut loose. Sudden as that, she was in freefall. A prestigious editorship at a major fashion magazine turned to ball and chain, the envied life of a socialite the vanity of a mere woman, a luxurious New York loft to the dreaded empty nest. At her third strong drink in an evening, she could feel the thin coat of dust layering her womb, a mausoleum. Her son and one frivolous argument too many did what scores of small men had tried and failed to do.

On balance, she supposed she ought to proud it took her this long for the bland Promethean cycle of waking-working-talking-eating-sleeping-repeat to wear her down, and ashamed she gave in at all. A good mother, she knew, would never be caught where she is now--standing out in an ill-fitting tinsel dress she wouldn’t have been caught dead in two years ago, avoiding the eyes of men too young for her (beneath her) in favor of one in particular.

I only want to look, she’d told herself as she’d scrabbled at the bottom of her purse (Himalaya Birkin, years out of style, a metaphor dangling in crocodile skin off her arm) for her keys. Just to see. Get close. Watch.

It had been complete coincidence that she’d found out about the art exhibit in the first place. An invite to a wretched student affair from a once-great school grasping for relevance in the cynical age of the internet stuffed in with her morning mail delivery, ordinarily not worth a second more of her attention than it took to sweep it into the trash. The name was what caught her attention, an instinctive flash in the pan--Fairchild.

He didn’t go by Fairchild, of course. He was a man, and why would a man wear anything but the name of another man? At the threshold of adulthood, Jonathan shed the vile name of the woman who had given him up in favor of a ghost of a father. Her own, she realized now, had never been in the running. And so he called himself Morgenstern, an ugly name sealing him off from her like foreign territory. Morgenstern had a terrible finality to it.

She didn’t answer a single email or call the rest of the morning, snapping at any EA foolhardy enough to raise a word against her. By noon, she knew the girl and her boyfriend from smiling model pictures on Instagram, incomplete snippets of life from Facebook and Twitter. The wordless temptation finally had a face and a name and an achingly familiar mane of red hair. Fairchild was the name of his sister by blood, the girl for whom his birth mother had scraped together enough love to keep.

She picked the weaker link first--the blond. Men gave themselves away more easily than women, basking in every oozing ounce of attention. She took his measure in-between smiles and small conversations, observing him over the shoulders of conversational partners she took no interest in. Well-built, handsome, artfully disarranged hair, a James Dean sort of affable. The type girls wished for long after he’d moved on from her entirely. She could see him in the glossy pages of a fashion magazine and allowed herself to hate him, dip the fashionable one syllable of his white-hipster name in poison. Jace.

The second hour she allowed herself closer, indulged in scratching the surface. Uncomfortable in worn jeans and leather jacket surrounded by talk of Bosch, Mondrian, Xiaodong, he was here for his girlfriend, treading water in the art world to lend her a familiar face. He flirted with the girl at the bar more out of obligation than interest, reading off his come here often? lines stiff and atonal. By the time she drifted up beside him at the bar, she had given him enough nuance she could have convinced herself to like him.

“I don’t suppose you could get me one of those?”

It came out easy, like slipping into clothes from another life. Her first job as waitress faking pretty rouged smiles through propositions and comments and ass-pinches, or her first magazine internship weathering the same. He was drinking beer, and she couldn’t stand beer, but men had a peculiar weakness for women who drank their own kinds of drink.

He turned, bemusement turning to something else as she deliberately met his gaze. He was lovely up close, and all in a dizzying rush she felt the barest spark of that indescribable satisfaction she’d been chasing, found the ghost of Jonathan’s angular features in the broader contours of his face. His too-polite smile broke the spell. “I’d love to, but I don’t think my girlfriend would like that very much.”

The waitress smile slipped off. Put him in his place. “It just seems you’re the only one who can get any service around here.”

His smile turned instantly sheepish. “Oh, uh--sorry.” A quick word with the bartender, and soon she had her very own mug of alcoholic piss. He visibly cast about for a line of conversation, and it raised her ire that she couldn’t tell if he did it out of flirtation or pity. “Are you with the gallery?”

“Oh, no. I’m with Poise magazine. We like to browse local shows for rising talent. Keeps us fresh.” She gave a half-flicker of lash at fresh. The cover story was self-indulgent--the answer she gave only mattered to herself. She wasn’t searching for her son where she knew he wouldn’t be found. The flirtation was by rote. “Are you an artist? We’re always doing submission intake.”

It was an old and familiar lie. General licensure was the best any hopeful would get without prior connections.

“Me? No way.” He was warming up to her, rising to her charm like a snake from a basket. How old was he? He couldn’t even be half her age. “Clar--my girlfriend, she’s the artist. I’m here for her.”

For her, not with her. There was a distinction. She cued up the smile she used for interviews. “That’s lovely. What kind of artist?”

“A painter.” For a second, Jace’s expression was almost shy. “She landed the art school gig, but her mom taught her. It’s kind of her last connection to her, you know? Painting keeps her mom alive.”

The enormity of his statement quavered between them like a note from a tuning fork struck on an edge. She felt her expression flicker and melt like wax--Jocelyn was dead. Was it cancer, murder, a hit-and-run? Half-thoughts spooled out in her imagination, part vindictive and part lurid. Did he know? Did he think of her the day he learned she was dead, wish for her to put her arms around him and let him cry into her? She savored the imaginary heat of his short, hitched exhales on her neck, the precious hot droplets of salt falling on her skin.

“Oh god, I’m sorry, I’m an ass,” Jace was babbling. “Did you--have you lost a parent too?”

For a moment, she could have laughed at him. Her father was buried, her mother entombed in a home somewhere conveniently out of mind. With a strange, electric jolt she realized he had assigned her fallen expression to the closest thing at hand, unbiased by that all-encompassing occupation: mother. A mother must have lost a child; a person could lose a parent a lover or a friend. It had been so very long since she’d been seen as anything but.

“Jace! JaceJaceJace--there you are!”

A mess of red-gold curls bounded by her to plant a messy wet kiss to Jace’s cheek. They kissed, young dewy-skinned and unabashed, and she watched with a feeling unlike Jonathan creeping on the edge of her thoughts. Jace broke away first, pulling her back into conversation. “This is, uh, Clary. Clary, this is--” he broke off, embarrassed.

Clary spluttered in the middle of knocking back the last of a sidecar, whipping around to stare at her with something wide-eyed and akin to wonder. “Don’t you--? Don’t you know who she is? Editor at Poise? The Lilith?”

“Not exactly,” Jace admitted.

Clary paid him no mind, cocktail glass immediately moored at the bar. She looked up at her and once she saw past the stars winking in the girl’s eyes, she could see they were the same soft hazel as her brother’s. Clary was drunk, and brimming with it from her ugly artistic blouse to her blunt art-student-lesbian bangs to the untamed curl of her hair. “It’s really you,” she gushed. “I’ve been following your blog forever, and your twitter--I’m being so embarrassing, aren’t I? Can I...can I have a picture?”

Lilith disliked her with a magnetism that pulled the girl in close, letting Clary slip an arm around her waist and hold up a phone too big for her small, delicate-boned hands. In the phone’s screen she could see herself frozen in real time, her red lips lifting in a waxen smile. Next to the peach-fuzz facewash-clean of Clary’s skin, her fashionable makeup and Oscar de la Renta dress looked old and severe, black and gold metals oozing out of her like a snake shedding skin.

“You were my first-ever crush,” Clary was saying with tipsy candor, and with a strange bump Lilith realized Clary was talking to her, not her boyfriend. Her words rushed out in a graceless rush, difficult to make out over the music and wordless chatter drowning her in a dull roar. “I’d spend hours cutting out your photoshoots from magazines, making collages--it drove mom crazy, all those internalized gender roles and whatever. She realized later I just thought you were really hot.”

The full blushing import of Clary’s words hit them all at once and Clary flushed a blotchy pink all the way to the roots of her hair and touched her free hand to her cheek. “Oh my god, I’m fucking drunk.”

Lilith became suddenly aware her hand was still on Clary’s warm waist, trapped under her arm. This was all unscripted, unrehearsed; she felt as flustered as Clary looked, thrown off by the noise and the heat and the alcohol she hadn’t even drank. She was wearing perfume, something cheap and cloying, and in a strange moment Lilith could imagine Clary spread out over a glossy page, slim peachy legs and delicate collarbones bold and daring out from under the heavy drape of a dark dress.

She reached for something cutting to take the girl down to size, but what came out instead was a genteel, “That’s very flattering.”

Clary gave her a pinched little smile in return, the very pink tip of her tongue darting over her bottom lip, and her blush did not abate. Lilith looked to Jace, who was looking between them with something uncertain in his eyes.

A strange, smouldering sensation had risen in her chest, thick and suffocating as a plume of smoke. Her hand did not so much as tremble when she raised a hand to tuck away a stray curl, the color so much lighter when it caught the light. Clary’s face swam before her eyes, raw and pink from crying over her dead mother.

“You’re very sweet,” she said, and there was a husky quality to her voice that only came on with one or two glasses of red wine. Her heart was pounding out a dull, insistent throb rising in time with a painful lump in her throat.

Her phone vibrated in her bag, breaking the spell with a start. She pulled away to relieve the sudden alcoholic flush and dug into her bag with utter disregard for her nails, feeling for the familiar cool rectangle of her phone. When at last she managed to disentangle herself citing creative emergencies needing her immediate attention and a whole host of familiar excuses, it was only then she realized on habit she’d given Clary her card.

The taxi ride back to her apartment was blissfully silent, dark except for the rising crests of light along the near-silent streets. Her own face hovered ghostly in the window, close enough to touch. Her fingertips met glass with a flash of red-gold and her eyes seared with a sudden heat, the ache in her sternum widening.

Her thoughts lingered on him as she greeted the front desk clerk, beside her in physical form in the elevator, hovering at the margins like a melancholy raincloud as she launched into her nighttime routine. Squalane cleanser to remove makeup, wash face before an exfoliant chemical blend, a layer of hydralaunic acid and then niacinamide to hydrate, an retinol under-eye cream to top it all off. The ritual grip of her thoughts relinquished only once she’d folded herself under the covers in her nightclothes, receding as she fell into the uneasy lull of sleep.

This time, the thought of him was mixed with traces of red and gold.