Shadowhunters and Downworlders

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.”

In fact, the scaling of that wall between them—or, more aptly, the smashing it out of the way—is what finally makes Simon and Clary’s friendship absolutely unshakable. They understand each other deeply enough that Simon goes along with Clary taking the incredible risk of going with Jace and Sebastian in City of Lost Souls, because he knows she’ll do it anyway, and this way at least he can be there for her via faerie radio receiver. Clary and Simon’s love for each other is epic—once they get the pesky prospect of romance out of the way.

The series’ other set of best friends—Alec and Jace—aren’t as openly demonstrative as Clary and Simon (read: no making out) but face a similar obstacle. Alec believes he’s in love with Jace, despite the prohibition against falling for your parabatai, and he has the added worry over coming out. But Jace knows Alec so well that he picks up on his friend’s budding relationship with Magnus when no one else does. And, in a pure Jace fashion, he outs this fact casually in City of Ashes, reminding Magnus he’s the only warlock they know who happens to be dating one of their friends. When Alec protests, Jace’s reaction is confusion. He wants Alec to be comfortable coming clean with him about this and goes so far as to assure him it doesn’t matter.