Author's Note: This fic started out as a brief framing scene for my Jace-and-Valentine short, Chiaroscuro, before taking on a sprawling life of its own. The ending of City of Glass leaves Jace and Clary (and the reader) with a lot of unfinished emotional business. The minute I got them talking about the events in my one-shot, it became clear they couldn't have the conversation I'd imagined without it all coming crashing down on their heads. The upshot was this fic.

In part, it's an extension of my one-shot, a closer look at what actually lay behind that never-forgotten episode of Jace's boyhood. But really this story is my take on the whole of The Mortal Instruments (the first trilogy, anyway): my own attempt to work through the unresolved emotional threads of Clare's story, and come to terms with them — everything that Valentine has meant to these two children, and everything he has done to them, and where his death leaves them (and us)...

Also a nice excuse to give Jace and Clary a little romantic time together :)

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A Note about Canon:
My fan fiction takes the original City of Bones trilogy as canon. Try to read this story as if you hadn't read the later three books, ignoring the ways it may contradict (or conceivably, echo) things that Clare has established since City of Glass — because that's how it was written. For more about why I haven't read the second trilogy or other extras, see my profile.

Disclaimer:
Everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also — to the best of my ability — tone and language and imagery: I've borrowed phrases and devices shamelessly, trying to get closer to the feel of her story. Readers of City of Ashes will recognize the dialogue quoted from there. Apologies also to Dorothy Dunnett, from whom I've stolen a couple of excellent lines, and to Dickens for some unforgettable imagery. The lyrics to Edith Piaf's incomparable chanson, Non, je ne regrette rien, were written by Michel Vaucaire.

N.B. The nine chapters in which this story was originally posted have now been merged into five, which is how it was actually written.

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Permanent Marks
by midwinter monday

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"It's not that I'm nervous about it, exactly." Clary stared out at the East River, watching a tug doggedly push its barge against the churning current. There was a cold wind blowing off the river, but it had stopped pouring for the first time all week, and she'd been desperate to get outside. Even if it meant eating lunch on a freezing bench under skies like slate, with a stiff breeze whipping her hair into her mouth. She tucked her hands into her sleeves, trying not to get egg salad on the cuffs. Jace, as usual, didn't seem to feel the cold.

"Ok, so maybe I am, a little," she admitted. It felt easier to talk out here, away from the Institute. It was probably just the horrible weather, and the unending hours of lessons, but she was starting to feel the weight of stone all around her almost like a physical pressure.

Not that she was unhappy: the lessons were too interesting for that. And Jace was always there waiting to reclaim her, shoulders propped against the corridor wall and a glow in his eyes that made her breath catch, when she emerged exhilarated and exhausted from another long session with whichever Lightwood was supervising her studies that day. They were supposed to be getting a new tutor any day now, but the Clave seemed to be taking their time about sending a replacement. "Maybe they can't find anyone qualified to teach us," Jace had suggested hopefully. More likely, Isabelle observed, nobody wanted the job of keeping Jace in order.

Actually, thought Clary, casting a quick look at Jace, he'd been unnaturally well-behaved these past weeks. Too well-behaved, she thought with a flicker of worry. But then, they were all subdued: struggling to come to terms with the shock of everything that had happened, and their own family tragedy. Shadowhunters lived their lives in the shadow of violent death, but a child was different. Max's death had torn a hole in their family you could see daylight through; it would be a long time, she thought, before any of them really recovered from his murder.

Something splashed out in the river making Clary start so that the soda she was holding spilled over her fingers in a fizzing stream.

Pull yourself together, Fray. Clary set down the can impatiently, sucking the stickiness off her knuckles. Luke would have told her to take a deep breath and count to ten, his steady blue gaze fixed on hers until she stopped freaking out. With the rational part of her brain, she knew that it was only a seagull snatching something from the waves, or a trick of the tide sending an little wave curling more fiercely than the rest — same as it had always been. Just because she could see the Shadow World now didn't mean starting to look for it behind every lamp post.

Demonic activity was actually as low as anyone could remember, so Maryse said — as if the collapse of Valentine's demon army had sent some kind of a dampening reverberation through the infernal worlds. Did demons get discouraged? Somehow it didn't seem likely. Whatever the reason though, there hadn't been a single demon outbreak in several weeks.

Still, Clary couldn't shake the feeling of dark things moving beneath the surface of the filthy water. The predictable side-effect of a crash course in demonology, she told herself firmly, repressing with a shudder a vision of black, oily tentacles reaching up out of the deep — or maybe the weather really was getting to her. That, and her uneasy awareness of the Clave's ongoing post-mortem into what they were already calling the Valentine Affair — as if, thought Clary bitterly, it had been an unpleasant scandal, not a war — and of the official enquiry that was hanging over them all, Jocelyn, Jace, the Lightwoods and she supposed herself, like the sword of Damocles.

An image flashed unwanted into her mind of a winged sword suspended against a wall, darkly gleaming, and she shoved it away queasily. The last time she'd seen that sword, it was buried to the hilt in Jace's bloody chest.

Clary stole a glance at Jace. He had polished off his souvlaki with his usual efficiency, and was leaning back against the bench, slicing his empty Coke can meditatively to ribbons with an ivory-handled dagger. Luckily the Promenade was pretty much deserted. Clary had the feeling even the most blasé Upper East Sider might notice a boy with a twelve-inch blade.

She opened her mouth, and then thought better of it.

As if he'd heard her, Jace looked up and the corners of his mouth lifted. "I know — no glamour. I imagine you're going to point out that if a passing jogger looked this way, we'd have a SWAT team on us faster than you can say 'New York recycles'. Maryse would go ballistic."

He cast a speculative glance down the promenade, and for an instant a gleam of mischief lit his shadowed face, but it didn't reach his eyes. Clary wasn't sure anything did these days. It was as if Jace was holding himself very still, like someone carrying a brimming bowl: something so precariously full that you had to move with infinite care or it would slop over the sides and spill over everything.

Of course the events of last month had shattered his world in ways she couldn't begin to fully imagine. More, even, than they had turned her own life upside down. She'd lost everything she thought she knew: her comfortable, ordinary Park Slope childhood; the clean-cut, smiling father she'd never known; her artistic, abstracted, normal mom; the reassuring certainty that the world was what it seemed. Everything she'd believed for sixteen years, rewritten out of existence, wiped clean as completely as Valentine and his demons had stripped her home bare.

But in exchange, a birthright — frightening and entrancing — that she was only beginning to explore. And her mother was still there. Irrevocably changed — but at the same time so totally, disconcertingly the same that sometimes when Clary watched her standing at her easel, dubiously dabbing at a canvas in her old paint-streaked smock, it was hard to believe these last weeks hadn't just been a dream.

Clary gazed across the water at the decaying industrial waterfront on the far side of the river, remote and unreal as a painted backdrop, and thought about her mother's part in those wrenching losses. In a way, the accusation Valentine had levelled at her mother was true. The things Valentine had taken away from Clary had never really been hers; she had just been allowed to think they were. It was going to take a while to forgive all the lies.

But you didn't stop loving people just because they made mistakes, however colossal. And her mother's own love for her was real, and always had been, even through all those years of deception. Love wasn't something you could rewrite, however illusory all the rest might turn out to be. Luke was still Luke too: solid, kind, totally dependable, if a little wolfier than she'd realized. Luke, whose patient devotion to her mother had finally brought him the reward he deserved. The past weeks had woven him more securely than ever into the fabric of her life. She had a lot salvaged from the wreckage.

Whereas for Jace, it was just a vast, black maelstrom of loss.

Clary crumpled up her sandwich paper savagely and threw it into the trash can at the end of the bench. A gust of wind flung it back at her.

Jace plucked it expertly out of the air an inch from her face.

"Nice one." Leaning across, he shied the crumpled wrapper neatly into the garbage can with a careless precision that suddenly made Clary think of Jace's dagger flying end over end across the room at Renwick's, swift and sure and deadly.

"Personally," he added blandly, "I'd try to aim a bit higher into the wind when going for that kind of rebound shot. Flattens the angle of return — and stops your weapon taking your nose off."

The mocking look faded from his face, as he took in her expression.

"It's nothing to be nervous about, Clary," he said, his voice unexpectedly gentle. With his free hand, he smoothed a wind-blown curl back from her face, and the brush of his fingertips was like an electric current tingling along her skin.

"Really it's not," he said firmly. "I promise."

With a sigh, Clary pulled her feet up onto the bench and wrapped her arms round her knees. "I know." She thought of telling Jace he'd misread her face and decided against it.

"I think it's mainly the not-knowing thing that's getting to me," she said, pressing her chin into the worn denim of her knees. Jace had stuck his dagger back in his belt and was fiddling with the shards of his soda can now, the way he did when he was unsettled, twisting the razor-sharp ribbons restlessly between his long fingers.

"Starting to become properly part of the Shadow World — it's like I'm suddenly a small child again: clueless about the most basic things, stuff everyone takes for granted." She hugged her knees tighter. "I guess I just hate not having the faintest idea what to expect."

Jace was silent for a moment.

"It's not a big deal." he said slowly. "Honestly. But you should probably talk to Isabelle or Alec. Or Luke." His voice was uninflected, but Clary could feel the sudden tension in his body. "My own experience was—" He hesitated, eyes on the twisted metal in his hands.

"Different," he finished eventually. "It's not anything you can go by." His fair head was bent, his face invisible beneath the gold, veiling curls. Clary could see a pulse beating at his throat. According to Isabelle, it wasn't something Jace talked about. He'd been too young, she said.

"Jace, what happened?" she asked gently, when it was clear he wasn't going to go on.

He was silent for so long she thought he wasn't going to answer. When at last he looked up, his face was a tangle of conflicting emotions. Reaching for his hand, Clary wound her small fingers around his strong, slender ones, the faded tracery of old Marks curling round them like scraps of lace. Even lying loose in her hand, she could feel their coiled strength.

Jace sighed, and his eyes lifted to hers then, wide and dark and undefended. He looked suddenly terribly vulnerable, and Clary thought of the way he had gazed at her on the steps of the Accords Hall the night of the victory celebrations — as if all the protective walls he'd thrown up around himself for so long had tumbled flat.

But he had seemed lost then, adrift. There was a light of quiet resolve in his face now, resolve and a trust so absolute it took her breath away. Not defencelessness, thought Clary, but deliberate and willing acquiescence — the composure of someone who sees the knife, and tranquilly bares their breast to the blade. You could do anything you wanted with me, and I would let you, he'd told her once.

"You really want to know?"

Clary nodded slowly. Suddenly she wasn't sure she did. But if Jace could bring himself to tell her — whatever it was — she could hear it. The wind was still rising, blowing off the river with a violence more typical of winter than early October. Pulling up her hood with a grimace, she waited.

"Are you sitting comfortably?" He shot her a sardonic glance from underneath his lashes, and Clary was relieved to hear the familiar mocking edge back in his voice. "It's a long story." He sat in silence for a moment longer, playing absently with her fingers, before closing his hand deliberately around hers.

"I probably shouldn't tell it to you — you don't like Shadowhunter stories much, do you?" The ghost of a reminiscent smile passed across his face. "But I think I'd like you to hear it." The dull grey skies had dimmed the bright gold of his eyes to brass, but a steady light shone in their depths.

"It tells you something about the power of belief, I suppose: mind over matter or something like that." He smiled faintly.

"And about my — about your — father."

Disentangling his fingers gently from hers, he turned away towards the gun-metal river sliding relentlessly between its banks, and staring straight ahead, began to speak.

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