Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(32)

Just as Simon and Clary always describe each other as “best friend,” so Jace describes Alec. In addition to having grown up together and being close friends, Jace and Alec are also parabatai. They fight together, and they have each other’s backs, but the parabatai bond means more than that. Parabatai are described as being “closer than brothers,” and, of course, they are also forbidden from falling in love with each other. In a very real sense, the parabatai bond is a pledge that formalizes friendship between warriors in the same way marriage does love. Parabatai know each other in a way no one else is able to. Alec is able to fake out everyone—even Isabelle—when Jace is imprisoned by the Inquisitor in City of Ashes by pretending to sell out his friend. But if they had the same bond with him that Jace does, they’d have instantly seen through his fakery, and known that his only intention is to help Jace get free. Alec doesn’t flinch when Jace says Valentine asked him to join Team Evil; he knows, without a doubt, that Jace would never have agreed and he understands that Jace needs reassurance that Alec would never believe he would. Jace is someone who needs other people’s good opinion of him, because he’s so quick to turn on himself. Alec knows this, because he knows his best friend.

But what about when it isn’t so clear whether a pair is meant to be or meant to be just friends? The Mortal Instruments proves more than once that the boundary between platonic friend and lover often appears more porous than it is…at least to the one who wants to make it across.

Unrequited Never Felt So Good

Both Alec and Jace’s and Simon and Clary’s friendships start the series with a one-sided crush destined to be crushed. Believing you are in love with your best friend is an entirely understandable thing. In real life, the best romances are either built on friendship or quickly grow to include one; otherwise it’s all chemistry, no trust and camaraderie. But who hasn’t been confused thinking that this person they share so much with might be able to love them in that way too? And is there anything worse than someone forcing the issue?

Take Simon and Clary’s relationship at the beginning of City of Bones, before they meet the Shadowhunters. This earliest incarnation of their friendship almost seems thin and strained—but only because of how strong it later becomes. Yes, they are best friends with a history stretching back to childhood, with great knowledge of each other’s quirks and with great affection for one another. But there’s also a wall between them, with one side made up of Simon’s desire for their relationship to become romantic and the other by Clary’s obliviousness at first and then tolerance of that desire. Their friend shorthand is compromised by the fact that one side—Simon—often indicates or says something to the other—Clary—that she isn’t fully reading, understanding, or seeing. Until, that is, the issue of Simon’s one-sided romantic feelings for Clary is forced.

That finally comes in City of Ashes, when these two best friends step over the line and test the make-out waters following the revelation that Clary and Jace are brother and sister. It doesn’t quite go how either expects. From the confusion that Clary feels when Simon calls her his girlfriend and it rolls off his tongue so easily, to the underwhelming emotional impact of their kissing on Clary and even how fast Simon falls asleep when she goes to change into her pajamas, we know this can only end in tears. But, instead, because this is a Cassie Clare book, it ends in blood.

When the Queen of Faerie announces that Clary must stay behind because she tasted faerie food, she also offers an out. A kiss, she says, and there’s a round robin of combinations proposed—Simon steps up to kiss Clary, and she thinks about how she’s not entirely comfortable with the prospect in this situation or any other, a tacit admission that the budding effort at romance isn’t going to work. But when Jace and Clary engage in their thinking-of-anything-but-England kiss, Simon sees the truth, even if he’s not ready to admit it yet either. Hurt, he takes off and gets himself killed. Or, rather, undead. One of the series’ most heartbreaking moments is Simon’s death scene in Clary’s arms, with her last words of “Simon, I love you” and her protective lashing out against Jace when she thinks he might try to kill Simon for good. Her tender insistence that Simon be buried in a Jewish cemetery for his rising, on being there when he claws his way from the ground—those are the moments when it becomes certain that not only will their friendship survive the crash-and-lukewarm-burn attempt at romance but it will be stronger because of it.

For Simon, the realization that this romance is doomed doesn’t happen quite so early. The first time he and Clary are reunited after his transition to being a vampire, he thinks about the threshold toward romance they’ve crossed as “fragile as a flickering candle flame,” and he also believes that it will be his fault if it breaks and that “something inside him would shatter too, something that could never be fixed.” The good thing is that he’s wrong, and by the end of the novel, he’s ready to openly acknowledge he’d rather have something real with Clary than a false love affair. He finally understands that what matters is that his and Clary’s friendship survives—and it does, and he does. By City of Fallen Angels, he’s dating Izzy and Maia at the same time, and when he and Clary end a phone conversation with simple declarations of love for each other, Simon reflects that he’d had so much trouble saying those words for so long but “[n]ow that he no longer meant them the same way, it was easy.”