[AO3 Crosspost] This chapter has no title
✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS
FANDOM: The Shadowhunter’s Chronicles
SERIES: More Fire than Ice
RATING: General
WORDCOUNT: 3 581
PAIRING(S): Past Clace
CHARACTER(S): Clary Fray, Jace Lightwood, Alec Lightwood
GENRE: Necessary break up
TRIGGER WARNING(S): -
SUMMARY: This chapter of Clary’s life could be called ‘What’s right isn’t always easy’ or ‘You can’t be two if you can’t be one’… but in truth, the only title she can bear to give it is ‘How I started being friends with Alec for real’.
This is how it begins.
MORE FIRE THAN ICE ON LJ: [ Series Masterpost]
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“I can’t help it if I don’t deserve you,” Jace tells her, his voice strained. “I can’t help it if things prove me right time and time again… You deserve better than me, Clary.”
She’s crying again-it burns at her cheeks and her eyelids, the hot mess of it is streaking down her neck… that’s just how things go when she speaks with Jace, isn’t it? It either ends in intense sex or tears, sometimes both-and sometimes it feels like her heart will explode with the strain of it.
She’s too tired for this.
Too exhausted to deal with that kind of bullshit just now… and yet here she is, with the same bone-deep ache for Jace as she’s always felt, the same insane longing for his hand on her, his mouth on hers, the entirety of him close enough that they’ll never be apart again.
Only this time there’s a heavy cloak of too much over it like a-a fur cloak soaked with water until just carrying it becomes a struggle, a burden.
Love should never be a burden.
“It’s not that I deserve better than you,” she sighs at last, a sob bubbling out of her throat despite her best effort, “It’s that I deserve you at your best, and you-you’re so busy trying to push everyone away you won’t even try to give me-to give us that!”
Once again, Jace pales.
It suits him, really, both the word and the action, the fiery glow of his skin fading into a pale winter dawn, sober and fragile and so easily covered. Jace, if he were a work of art, would be an icon -a martyr , Clary thinks, the faint pull of nervous laughter tugging at the corner of her lips, he’d be a martyr.
That is, of course, if he weren’t making himself one in the first place.
“Every time something goes even remotely wrong, you run away,” Clary continues -the words burn deep in her stomach, climb her throat in acid bubbles that seem to sting Jace as bad as they do her, but maybe it’s the ugly truth in them that burns. “You just-you just shut down and you won’t allow anyone to talk to you -and when we try to talk to you all you can think of is to become this-this-this horrible person so we’ll leave!”
“I just don’t want you hurt,” Jace answers, shoulders squaring with his usual stubbornness, “I don’t want you guys to worry about me-I don’t deserve it.”
Clary wonders if he’s always stood so straight when he told her that kind of things before.
She wonders if they’ve ever had a serious discussion about it before, one that didn’t end with her swearing she’d never stop loving him anymore and them crashing into a kiss and drowning into each other on the nearest surface available.
It should probably surprise her more than it does when she can’t remember any.
“See,” she insists, feeling anger prickle inside her palms, “see that’s exactly why I’m mad at you right now-”
“You’re mad at me?”
Oh, the curve of his lips, the way his eyebrows seem to fall in pain-Clary wants to run to him, to kiss him and promise nothing will ever take them apart… she takes a step backwards, toward the kitchen door.
Jace stays between the island and the oven, looking for all the world like he forgot how to move.
“Yes,” Clary forces out through the knot in her throat. “Yes I’m mad-and this time I’m going to stay mad! I’m mad that you and I can never have a serious conversation, and I’m mad that your excuse for hurting us is that you don’t want to hurt us-but most of all I’m mad that you keep somehow making it all our fault-”
“I never said that!” Jace protests, horror rising in his eyes, “Never, Clary, you’re wrong, I never said it was your fault!”
“It’s true,” Clary agrees, “you didn’t say it. But when you lash out at people until they leave you and then act like our being away is the reason why you’re hurting so much-well, what else are we supposed to understand, uh?”
And there comes the vulnerability again.
It hurts, really, to realize Clary can describe and predict these things step by step -every time, every time they try to talk about serious topics, inevitably, Jace makes this face. He doesn’t do it on purpose, of that she’s sure, but he still does it, this whole- facade crumbling away to reveal all the hurt beneath, every cut none of them managed to patch-not Alec with his endless devotion, not Isabelle and her stout affection… not even Clary and the storms in her lungs, not even her and the power of a thousand runes in her palms.
No one.
For the first time since she knows him and his story, Clary wonders if maybe Jace was hurt beyond repair. If, maybe, they’ve all been waiting and hoping for too long.
“Are you-” -Clary has to look away for the next bit- “Are you leaving me?”
“For now,” she admits, voice croaking as her eyes fall to the way Jace’s fingers are gripping the kitchen’s island. “It’s not good for us to be together just now.”
It’s not good for me , she thinks, but if I tell you that you’ll turn it into yet another proof you’re doomed.
She braces herself
“You need therapy. I need therapy… in fact,” she adds with a bitter chuckle, “With everything that happened in the past two years I’m pretty sure we all need therapy but I don’t have much hope about convincing a bunch of Nephilims -or Shadowhunters, even- to go see a doctor. I’m just hoping I can convince you.”
She takes a deep breath and makes himself look at Jace again for the last part:
“I want to be with you-no, let me finish!”
She keeps her hand up until she’s sure Jace will listen. It’s kind of a first, for her, to cut him off -usually it’s the other way around- and she has to swallow her nerves down before she can tell him the most important part.
“I want to be with you-but right now I can’t. Not until learn that you are worth something, and that hurting others isn’t going to do anything to help you.”
“Clary, I need y-”
“I DON’T WANT YOU TO NEED ME!”
She doesn’t realize she’s reached the door until her back slams into it hard.
It’s not Jace she’s scared of, not really. She’s often been scared for his safety, for their relationship -scared he’d leave her, too- but she’s never been scared of him, and today is no exception.
She simply doesn’t trust herself not to slip into his arm and tell him they can forget it, promise him things she shouldn’t promise, not just now. She doesn’t want to end up making promises that, should she somehow manage to keep them, would hurt Jace almost as much as they’d hurt her.
“I don’t want you to need me,” she repeats. “I don’t want to be your medicine, or-or your drug, whatever it is you’d need me for, I don’t want to be it. That’s not love, Jace! It’s not! And if I stay-if I don’t leave now I’ll just-I don’t want to end up-”
Clary’s voice gives out before she can fully finish her sentence, croaks to a high-pitched whine when she starts sobbing again, and when she hears Jace breathe in once -sharp and wet and oh so hard to ignore- she knows without looking that he’s crying, too.
He’s never cried before, not that she knows of. At least not while she knew him, and the idea that she’s making him cry-she needs to leave.
If she sees his tears, she’ll never be able to and she knows-she can feel in the pit of her stomach, that it’d be the worst possible outcome of all this.
She needs to leave.
She needs to leave.
Leave , she tells herself, leave now.
With a sob, she bursts out of the kitchen and runs through the corridors as if flying from a demon. Isabelle demands to know what happened this time when Clary sends her reeling into the wall.
She turns around, still sobbing, tries to explain, to say something but she can’t push the words past the pain in her throat.
When Jace emerges from the kitchen, Clary turns around and slams the elevator button -it opens almost instantly and she jams the ground level button with shaky fingers while her free hand wipes tears out of her eyes, the sound of Jace’s voice calling for her haunting her ears even when she’s finally alone.
A part of her knows running away without looking where she’s going isn’t a good idea -that it won’t solve her problems or tell her what to do, but there’s something about the way her lungs and legs are burning, something about the wind rushing through the short layer of hair on her skull and the drizzle stinging at her face, that makes it easier to bear the pain of it all.
She’s vaguely aware, as she comes to as stop in a part of Central Park she’s never seen before, that people are staring at the Runes on her arms like they’re gang sign -like, for some reason, her black lines and white scars made her unsuitable company. Usually it bothers her to think she’s being judges so harshly for a part of her she could never let go of, but today it’s a source of comfort.
It means, a least, she doesn’t run the risk of having someone coming up to her for so-called ‘small talk’.
There’s fire in her lungs as she bends down to brace herself against her knees, feeling like she’s going to throw up any second now, but also a persistant buzzing in her skin, like running on caffeine after one too many nights spent completing a demonology assignment any of the Lightwood siblings would treat like child’s play. There’s another sort of tiredness, too, the kind that doesn’t come with physical effort, but rather with too many questions floating around your head and banging against the walls of your skull hard enough to cover all other noise and leave only the smell of warm earth under the rain.
Clary doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know what to do. She looks around herself and see only unfamiliar landscapes and faces, and curious glances mingling with suspicious glares, and the memory of Isabelle asking what the fuck happened this time?
It’s sad, Clary thinks, that somewhere along the line all of us has come to regard the world ending as a common occurrence -that they’re all prepared to have it burst out in their face anytime now, because it seems that’s just the way things go for them, apparently.
Clary is eighteen and she knows more about war and plotting than she does about dating and how to maintain healthy relationships.
Talk about healthy-she can barely do practical, how can she be expected to deal with this?
How do you even deal with the knowledge that being with the boy you love is hurting you -both of you- more than it makes either of you happy? There’s no textbook for that, no coursework telling you what you should do in those case. Sure, there’s TV, but Jace is no crazy-murderer, and he’d never come after Clary with a weapon, not so long as he remains himself.
She doesn’t need to be told how violently she’s going to die, she needs to be told what she should do about Jace, and there’s nowhere she can go to, nobody she can- except there actually is.
She fishes her phone out of her back pocket with shivering hands, wondering hew she managed not to lose it in her run, and roots around in her repertoire to find the number she’s looking for.
“It’s eight am here and I got to bed like, an hour ago -so I’d really appreciate it if you could keep your sentences short,” Alec half-yawns, half-grunts when he finally picks up his phone.
“I just broke up with Jace.”
Alec barely has time to ask “what” before everything just spills out of Clary -how her psych class was studying various forms of abuse and how gaslighting felt painfully familiar and how she didn’t mean to-didn’t want to-but there really wasn’t anything else she could-was there? Was there even any way she could have done anything else, or prevented this, or just handled it in a less hysterical way? Was there anything she could have done? Is there anything she can do?
“I don’t know what to do,” she sobs in the end, “I don't-I was so sure it would last forever and I-oh God, what should I do?”
“How would I know?” Alec retorts with a fain edge of hysteria to his voice, “Not only was everyone sure the two of you would last forever, when, in our acquaintance, did you somehow get the impression that I’m a suitable source of advice for that kind of things?”
“You’re his parabatai!” Clary nearly yells, voice straining on the word. “You know him better than anyone-”
“Not better than you.”
“That’s not the point, Alec!”
Clary’s nerves are clearly fraying, and she braces herslf against a tree to try and steady the wild hammering of her heart, but to no avail. All it really gets her is the bark of an old oak digging into her forearm and palm while she tries not to work herself into a panic again.
“The point is that I don’t know what to do and I’m hoping you can help me! Maybe you’re not an expert in a-in difficult relationships, but you used to be in love with him too, right? You have to know what it’s like?”
“Partly,” Alec sighs in the receiver. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you it never got anywhere though.”
Clary hears fabric rustling in the background as Alec grunts, and she tries to imagine what he looks like right now, but her mind draws a blank. She’s never seen him like this, she realizes, taken at the very start of his day, when it’s too early for him to care -although, possibly, that’s also due to the fact that she and Jace rarely got out of bed as early as Alec when she stayed at the Institute.
“And beside, I don’t think you’d want advice from me anyway-look at how my only relationship ended.”
“That was different,” Clary tells him, but Alec sighs -she hears a door creaking on his side of the line, and the characteristic sounds of a coffeemaker coming to life. Evidently he doesn’t plan on going back to bed.
“Not so much,” he says. “He did leave because I hurt him, but I never considered it a possibility… all in all I’m probably more like Jace than I am like you.”
“Don’t say that,” Clary protests, but Alec chuckles at her dismissal.
“Why not? It’s just the way we are, Clary. Nephilims just don't-”
“They don’t what? Get PTSD?” As usual, Clary’s sarcasm seems to get right over Alec’s head because he says:
“I don’t know,” Alec sighs. “But we just don’t pay attention to that kind of things. We hunt demons-people die and get hurt all the time. When the average lifespan in your work branch is below sixty you just don’t bother with how people talk to each other.”
“I’m sorry,” Clary sighs, “That sucks.”
“That’s how it is,” Alec replies, sounding like he’d rather be talking about something else. “But I think you confronting Jace about his own issues could be a good thing. There was never a real point to that kind of discussion for me,” he adds, “but I guess if it makes both you and him happier, it can’t hurt.”
“That’s an overwhelming amount of support,” Clary sighs, “Thank you Alec.”
“It’s no big deal. Beside, like you said, we’re parabatai. We’re supposed to take each other for granted -there’s just no time to think about anything else. I don’t know about other Nephilim families, but for us Shadowhunters the only thing you really have time for is roll with the punches, that’s all. We make it work, but it doesn’t mean it’s healthy… and I guess, when you started coming along with us I figured you should learn to do the same.”
Clary stays silent for a moment, trying to imagine what it’s like to be in Alec’s position.
She never really paused to think on it, but maybe she should have… maybe he’s right and she was wrong to go to him for advice. Maybe he really does know more about feeling lost than he knows about dealing with that kind of situation.
The ground around Clary is barely damp, but the rest of the park is shining with raindrops as the sun slowly emerges from behind the clouds. It all looks like a Turner painting, layers of gold shimmering in the air above her head and painting New York with the clear look of something cleaner -inasmuch as New York can be considered a clean place, that is.
The smell of fresh mud lingers in the air, a heavy, damp perfume that reminds Clary of the days when she still thought Jace was her brother -when they’d gone to the Wayland manor and nearly got crushed under the debris.
She thought being with Jace was complicated back then, but at least there were reasons. There were explanations. And even after, with Lilith, and Sebastian, and then… It’s no surprise the two of them always had a complicated relationship, but now she can’t help wonder if things would have gone different if they hadn’t constantly been in thrown in life or death situations.
“So I guess you really don’t know what it is I should do, uh?”
“Sorry,” he apologizes.
Clary chuckles through the wetness of her tears.
“Look, I don’t think Jace and I can really work that kind of things out anymore. Even if we started trying talking it through, it’s all been going on for so long-I’d just end up being nasty. But maybe there’s a way the two of you can work things out yet… and I think that’d be beneficial all around.”
Clary’s chuckle surprises even herself, the bitterness of it acrid at the back of her throat and wipes her eyes with a dirty hand, smearing mud over her cheek.
“Alright. Okay, in the long run it’s a good thing. Right now though I just… I don’t know if I can be near him. I don’t think I’d be able to stay away and-but I can’t just go away forever, right?”
“No,” Alec agrees, “but you can come spend the summer in San Francisco. Aline said she’d visit too, and in fact you’re exactly what we need: mundane-savy. So if you’re okay with going to a couple of gay bars during your stay….”
Clary’s instinctual response is to shake her head. She’s never really talked to Alec before -not like this anyway. Not like they’re actually friends.
“We are friends,” Alec says, making Clary jumps -she didn’t realize she was thinking aloud. “At least as far as I’m concerned.”
“I’m sorry,” Clary starts, “it’s not-”
“I see your point, Clary. We didn’t start off the best of way and I guess after that you and I both were too busy to have a heart to heart. So, if you don’t feel like it, you don’t have to come. I’m just saying there’s plenty of spare rooms here and three hours of time difference. Also there’s only one guy in your age range and I’m pretty sure there’s zero chance he’s going to proposition you.”
Clary chuckles, genuinely amused now.
“You know what,” she says at last, “I think a few weeks in California can’t hurt me after all. Maybe I can create a Rune that’ll let me tan rather than burn.”
“That’s the spirit,” Alec says, and Clary smiles.
Sunshine has replaced rain now, and the smell of fresh air makes her lungs feel fuller somehow -unless maybe that’s because her tears cleaned something from her, cleared a weight she didn’t realize was there. Of course, things aren’t fully settled yet. She still wants to see Jace, to be honest.
Still wants to go to him and settle in his arms, hug him until she forgets the outside world exists and loses herself in the embrace, except she can’t. She knows it wouldn’t be healthy -she doesn’t really feel it just now, not truly, but she knows it.
She also knows from experience that getting better isn’t something that happens all at once… She’s not going to get to San Francisco and leave all her issues at the door of the Institute, no more than Jace is going to spend an hour with a therapist and come out with a better sense of how to deal with his own issues… but at least it’ll be a step in the right direction.
It’s not much, but right now, it has to be enough.